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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 



WHITE MOUNTAIN 
TRAILS 

TALES OF THE TRAILS 

TO THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT WASHINGTON AND 
OTHER SUMMITS OF THE WHITE HILLS 

BY 

WINTHROP PACKARD 

Author of "Florida Trails,^'' ^'Literary Pilgrimage 
of a Naturalist,'''' ''Wild Pastures,^'' etc, 

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 




BOST ON 

SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



r 



Copyright, 1912 
By Small, Maynard and Company 

(incorporated) 



Entered at Stationers' Hall 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



£C!.A31G101 



.0^ 



TO THE 

APPALACHIAN MOUNTAIN CLUB 

WHOSE PATHS MADE IT POSSIBLE 

THIS BOOK 

IS APPRECIATINGLY DEDICATED 



FOREWORD 

The author wishes to express his thanks to 
the editors of the " Boston Evening Transcript " 
for permission to reprint in this volume matter 
originally contributed to the columns of that 
paper; to Mr. Frederick Endicott of Canton, 
Massachusetts, for permission to reproduce his 
photographs of "Sunrise on Mount Washington," 
" Clouds Cascading over the Northern Peaks," 
" Fog on Mount Cannon," and " Lafayette from 
Bald Mountain"; to the Appalachian Mountain 
Club for the shelter of cosy camps so hospitably 
open to all wayfarers ; and to many mountain 
people, especially those who dwell summers in 
the tiny hamlet on Mount Washington Summit, 
for unassuming hospitality and friendly guid- 
ance. 



CONTENTS 

Page 

I. Up Chocorua i 

II. Bobolink Meadows 17 

III. Climbing Iron Mountain 32 

IV. June on Kearsarge 48 

V. Rain in the Mountains 64 

VI. Carter Notch 79 

VII. Up Tuckerman's Ravine 96 

VIII. On Mount Washington 112 

IX. Mount Washington Butterflies 128 

X. Mountain Pastures 144 

XI. The Northern Peaks 160 

XII. The Lakes of the Clouds 175 

XIII. Crawford Notch 191 

XIV. Up Mount Jackson 206 

XV. Carrigain the Hermit 222 

XVI. Up the Giant's Stairs 238 

XVII. On Mount Lafayette 252 

XVIII. A Mountain Farm 268 

XIX. Summer's Farewell 284 

Index 299 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Sunrise from the summit of Mount Washington . Frontispiece ^ 

FACING PAGE 

"The smooth highway over which thousands of auto- 
mobiles skim in long summer processions from 
Massachusetts to the Mountains" 2 ^^^ 

" You realize the grandness and beauty of this outpost 

sentinel of the White Hills " 8 --^ 

" The shadowy coolness of evening was welling up and 

blotting the gold of sunset from the treetops " . . 161/ 

The Glen Ellis River at Jackson, New' Hampshire, Thorn 

Mountain in the distance 20 i^ 

Down the Wildcat River, over the brink of Jackson Falls, 

Moat Mountain in the distance 24 v^ 

" From nowhere does one get a better view of Kearsarge 
than from this little cairn on the plateau which is 
the summit of Iron Mountain " 44 V 

Sunset over Iron Mountain and Jackson, seen from Thorn 

Mountain 46 

Kearsarge and Bartlett, seen from Middle Mountain, 

near Jackson 48 1/ 

From Eagle Mountain one may see Kearsarge, blue 
and symmetrical in the distance, peering over the 
shoulder of Thorn 501/ 

Sunset light on the Southern Peaks, seen from the sum- 
mit of Mount Washington 64 

Clouds on Mount Washington, from the Glen Road, 

Jackson 78 



xii ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

Carter Notch seen over Doublehead from Kearsarge sum- 
mit 80 

" Always climbing by easy gradients toward the great V in 

the Carter-Moriah Range " 84 

The Appalachian Mountain Club camp in Carter Notch 90 

"The snow arch at the head of Tuckerman's Ravine 

holds winter in its heart all summer long "... 96 

" Then the shadows are deep under the black growth 
that spires up all about the little placid sheet of 
water, though it still reflects the sapphire blue of 
the clear sky above" 100 

The Appalachian Mountain Club camp in Tuckerman's 

Ravine 104 

"The giant is awake, has tossed his bedclothes high in 
air, and is striding away along the notch behind 
their shielding fluff" 108 

" It all depends on what winds Father Aeolus keeps 
chained, perhaps in the deep caverns of the Great 
Gulf, or which ones he lets loose to rattle the chains 
of the Tip Top House " 112 

"The more distant valleys were deeply hazed in this 
amethystine blue, but the nearer peaks and plateaus 
stood so clear above them that it seemed as if one 
might leap to the Lakes of the Clouds or step across 
the Great Gulf to Jefferson in one giant's stride " . 118 

" Dawn on the mornings of those days was born out of 
the sky above the summit, as if the fading stars left 
some of their shine behind them " 120 

Butterfly-time on Mount Washington, the summit seen 

over the larger of the Lakes of the Clouds . . . 128 

The fantastic lion's head which, carved in stone, guards 
the trail along Boott's Spur toward the summit cone 
of Washington 136 



ILLUSTRATIONS xui 

FACING PAGE 

" Semidea persistently haunts the great gray rock-pile 

which is the summit cone" 138 

" The stocky, square-headed, white-faced cattle may well 
feel themselves superior to these beings far below 
who groom and feed them" 144 

Mountain Sandwort in bloom on a little lawn near Mount 

Pleasant on the last day in July 154 

Clouds on the Northern Peaks, Mount Adams seen from 

Mount Washington summit 160 

"Where the path swings round the east side of Jefferson" 164 ^ 

Cataract of clouds pouring over the Northern Peaks into 
the Great Gulf, seen from the summit of Mount 
Washington 168 "^ 

"Dwarfed firs, beautiful in their courage, set spires along 
portions of their borders^ dark, straight lashes for 
clear blue eyes" 182 ' 

Spaulding Lake at the head of the Great Gulf, Mounts 

Adams and Madison in the distance 188^' 

" Profile of Webster," looking toward Crawford Notch 

from the old Crawford farmhouse site 192 ' 

" Where railroad, highway, and river draw together and 
touch elbows in passing through the gateway of the 
Notch" 198 

" Just below the nick of the Notch you may see where 
the Silver Cascade and the Flume Cascade hurry 
down from their birth on Mount Jackson, and farther 
down the vast slope of Webster " 202*' 

In the heart of Crawford Notch, the summit of Jackson 

on the distant horizon 204 

" As if giants had carved a huge, preposterous figure of 

a flying bird there for a sign to all who pass " . . 224 ^'' 

" Nor is this to be said in any scorn of the lumberman. 
He bought the woods and is using them now for the 
purpose for which he spent his money " . . . . 232 / 



xiv ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

" My way to the Giant's Stairs lay over the high shoulder 
of Iron Mountain, where the road shows you all the 
kingdoms of the mountain world spread out below" 238^^ 

" From the top tread of the Giant's Stairs one sees half 

of the mountain world, the half to southward " . . 248 

" On the way the gray brow of Mount Cannon looks in 

through the gaps in the foliage " 256^^ 

Profile lake, Franconia Notch, and Mount Lafayette 

from Bald Mountain 264 

" Such beauties as these the mountains set daily before 
the eyes of the man who hewed out the highest farm 
in New England on the high shoulder of a westerly 
spur of Wildcat Mountain " 270^ 

"The Glen Boulder has a George Washington nose, a 
Booker Washington chin, and the low forehead of 
the cave man " 288 / 

The Crawford trail along Franklin, Mount Pleasant in the 

distance 294 / 

" The world was blotted out in a gray mass of scudding 
vapor that gradually became black night out of which 
by and by rain came hissing " 296' 



WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 



UP CHOCORUA 

The Mountain and Its Surroundings in 
Mid-May 

The smooth highway over which thousands of 
automobiles skim in long summer processions 
from Massachusetts to the mountains, coquettes 
with Chocorua as it winds through the Ossipees. 
Sometimes it tosses you over a ridge whence the 
blue bulk and gray pinnacle stand bewitchingly 
revealed for a second only to be eclipsed in an- 
other second by the lesser, nearby beauties of the 
hill country, and leave you wistful. Sometimes 
it gives you tantalizing flashes of it through trees 
or by the gable of a farm-house on a round, hay- 
field hill, but it is only as you glide down the long 
incline to the shores of Chocorua Lake that the 
miracle of revelation is complete. Then indeed 



2 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

you must set your foot hard on the brake and 
gaze long over the Scudder farm-house gate 
down a green slope of field to the little lake, and 
as the eye touches approvingly Mark Robertson's 
rustic bridge, set in just the right spot to give 
the human touch to the wild beauty of the land- 
scape, and leaps beyond to the larger lake framed 
in its setting of dark growth, and on again to 
the noble lift of the great mountain with its bare 
pinnacle of gray granite, you realize the grandeur 
and beauty of this outpost sentinel of the white 
hills. It is hard to believe that Switzerland or 
Italy or any other country has anything finer 
than this to show the traveller. 

It was a wonder day in May when I first 
stopped, spell-bound, upon this spot. A soft blue 
haze of spring was over all the mountain world, 
making mystery of all distant objects and lifting 
and withdrawing the peak into the sky of which 
it seemed but a part, only a little less magical and 
intangible. Hardly was this a real world on this 
day, but rather one painted by some mighty mas- 
ter out of semi-transparent dust of gems. The 
lake was a mirror of emerald stippled about its 




rt O 

O i/i 

=^ ^ 

is <" 



UP CHOCORUA 3 

distant border with the chrysophrase reflection 
of young leaves, carrying deep in its heart an- 
other, more magical, Chocorua of softest sapph- 
ire tapering to a nadir-pointing peak of beryl. 
Out of the nearby woods came the song of the 
white-throated sparrow, the very spirit of the 
mountains, a song like them, built of gems that 
fade from the ear into a trembling mist of sound, 
the nearby notes sapphire peaks, the others dis- 
tant and more distant till they seem but the rec- 
ollection of a dream. Such days come to the 
mountains in May and they bring the white- 
throats up with them from the haze of the sub- 
tropics where they are born. 

If one would climb Chocorua by the Ham- 
mond trail he must leave the smooth road that 
winds onward to Crawford Notch after he passes 
Chocorua Lake. There another, less smooth but 
still available to carriage or motor, will take him 
across Chocorua Brook and end at a house in 
the woods. Just before the end it crosses a 
second brook, and there is the beginning of the 
trail, a slender footpath only, but well defined 



4 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

in the earth and well marked by little piles of 
stone wherever it goes over ledges. It is hardly 
possible to miss it in daylight; after dark it 
would be hardly possible to find it. Twice it 
crosses the brook, the second time leaving it to 
gurgle contentedly on in its ravine and rising 
more directly skyward. Beech and birch 
branches shimmered overhead with the trans- 
lucent green of half-grown young leaves along 
the lower reaches of this trail. Maples flushed 
the green in spots with tapestry of coral red. 
Scattered evergreens, pine, spruce, hemlock and 
fir lent backgrounds of green that was black in 
contrast to the lighter tints. Smilacina, checker- 
berry and partridge berry wove carpets of vary- 
ing color in the tan brown of last year's leaves, 
climbing the slope as bravely as anyone, and 
painted and purple trilliums did their best to 
follow, but had not the courage to go very far. 
The pipsissewa, bellwort and Solomon's seal did 
better. A few of them dared the ledges well up 
to the top of the first great southerly spur which 
the trail ascends. 

It was the day after I had first seen Chocorua 



UP CHOCORUA 5 

and a wind out of the west had blown the blue 
haze of unreality away from the mountain, mass- 
ing it to the east and south where it still held 
the land in thrall. I got the blue of it through 
straight stems of beech and birch and through 
the soft quivering of their young leaves painted 
with the delicate coral tracery of maple fruit. 

All the way up the lower slope one is drowned 
in Corot. I watch yellow-bellied sap-suckers 
make love among the beeches, the crimson of 
their crowns and throats flashing with ruby 
fire, the blotched gray and white of wings and 
bodies a living emanation of the bark to which 
they cling. Their colors seem the impersonal 
fires of the young trees personified. In this,, 
another wonder day of May, the goodness of 
God to the green earth flows in a tide of un- 
nameable colors up the mountain-side, enflaming 
bird and tree alike and from the great shoulder 
of the mountain I look down through its mist 
of mystery and delight to Chocorua Lake, a 
clear eye of the earth, wide with joy and show- 
ing within its emerald iris as within a crystal 
lens magic mountains, upside down, and between 



6 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

their peaks the turquoise gateway to another 
heaven, infinitely deep below. The lowland for- 
est sleeps green at my feet, a green of sea 
shoals that deepen into the tossing blue of 
mountains far to the south, Ossipee, Whittier, 
Bear Camp and the lesser hills of the Sandwich 
range. 

Many of the shrubs and trees of the lower 
slopes climb well to the top of this great south- 
erly spur of the mountain, but straggle as they 
climb and lessen in number as they reach the 
height. Few of the lowland birds get so far, 
but among the dense spruces and firs which 
crowd one another wherever there is soil for 
their roots among the weather worn ledges, de- 
ciduous trees sprinkle a green lace of spring 
color, and among the spruces, too, is to be heard 
the flip of bird wings and an occasional song. 
Here the hardier denizens of the country farther 
to the north find a congenial climate. Myrtle 
warblers show their patches of yellow as they 
flit about, feeding, making love and selecting 
nest sites, and with them the slate-colored juncos 
glisten in their very best clothes and show the 



UP CHOCORUA 7 

flesh color of their strong conical bills. These 
two are birds of the mountain and they climb 
wherever the spruce does. 

Beyond the crest of this great southerly spur 
the path dips through ravines and climbs juts 
of crag and debris of crumbled granite to the 
base of the great cone which is the pinnacle. 
Now and then one gets a level bit for the sav- 
ing of his breath and his aching leg muscles 
and may find a seat on fantastically strewn 
boulders, dropped by the glaciers when they fled 
from the warmth to come. On up the mountain 
go the small things of earth, too. Here are 
sheep laurel and mountain blueberries, stockily 
defiant of the winter's zero gales, the laurel 
clinging as firmly to its last year's leaves as it 
does on the sunny pastures of the sea level hun- 
dreds of miles to the south, the roots set in the 
coarse sand that the frost of centuries has 
crumbled from rotten red granite. Poplars 
climb -among the spruces and willows are there, 
their Aaron's rods yellow with catkins in the 
summer-like heat that quivers in the thin air. 



8 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

The trees feel in them the call to the summit 
as does man. 

As they go on you seem to see this eagerness 
to ascend expressed in the attitudes of the trees 
themselves. To the southwest a regiment of 
birches has charged upward toward the base of 
the pinnacle. Boldly they have swarmed up the 
steep slope and, though the smooth acclivities 
of the ledges about the base of the cone have 
stopped all but a corporal's guard, and though 
they stand, theirs is the very picture of a tur- 
bulent, onrushing crowd. Motionless as they 
are, they seem to sway and toss with all the 
restless enthusiasm of a mighty purpose; nor 
could a painter, depicting a battle charge, place 
upon canvas a more vivid semblance of a wild 
rush onward toward a bristling, defiant height. 
Few are the birches that have passed' this glacis 
of granite that forever holds back the body of 
the regiment, yet a few climb on and get very 
near the summit of the gray peak. More of 
the dwarf spruces have done so. In compact, 
swaying lines they rush up, marking the wind 
and spread of slender defiles and leaning with 



UP CHOCORUA 9 

such eagerness toward the summit that you 
clearly see them climbing, though they are in- 
dividually motionless, rooted where they stand. 
There is a black silence of determination about 
these spruces that must indeed carry them to 
the highest possible points, and it does, while 
to the eye the birches behind them toss their 
limbs frantically and cheer. 

Whether the little blue spring butterflies climb 
the mountain or whether they live there, each 
in his chosen neighborhood, going not far either 
up or down, it is difficult to say, but I found 
them in many places along the trail to the base 
of the cone, little thumb-nail bits of a livelier, 
lovelier blue than either the sky or the distant 
peaks could show, frail as the petals of the bird- 
cherry blossoms that fluttered with them along 
the borders of the path, yet happy and fearless 
in the sun. With them in many places I saw 
the broad, seal-brown wings of mourning cloaks, 
and once a Compton tortoise flipped from the 
path before me and hurried on, upward toward 
the summit. I looked in vain for him there, 
but as proof that butterflies do climb to the 



lo WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

very top of Chocorua I saw, as I rested on the 
square table of granite which crowns it, a 
mourning cloak, which soared up and circled 
me as I sat, rose fifty feet above, then coasted 
the air down toward the place where the birches 
seemed to toss and cheer in the noonday sun. 
He had won the height, and more, and I en- 
vied him the nonchalant ease with which his 
slanting planes took the descent. 

One other creature I saw, higher yet, a 
broad-winged hawk that swung mighty circles 
up from the ravine to the southeast, down 
which one looks in dizzy exaltation from the 
very summit. There was a climber that outdid 
all the rest of us in the swift ease of his as- 
cent. Out of nothing he was borne to my sight, 
a mote in the clear depths three thousand feet 
below, a mote that swept in wide spirals grandly 
up with never a quiver of the wing. Up and 
up he came till he swung near at the level of 
my eye, then swirled on and on, a thousand 
feet above me. A moment he poised there, then 
with a single slant of motionless wings turned 



UP CHOCORUA II 

and slid down the air mile on mile, one grand, 
unswerving coast, to vanish in the blue distance 
toward Lake Ossipee. 

Southerly from Chocorua summit the land 
was soused in the steam of spring. Chocorua 
Lake lay green at my feet, an emerald mirror 
of the world around it. To its right a little 
way Lonely Lake was a dark funnel in the 
forest, a shadowy crater opening to unknown 
depths in the earth below, filled with black 
water, and all to the east and south the coun- 
try lay flat as a map, colored in light green, 
the lakes in dark green or steel blue, the 
roads in dust brown, the villages scattered white 
dots, while beyond a blue mist of mountains 
was painted on the margin for the horizon's 
edge. 

To look north and west was to look into 
another world, to realize for what mountains 
Chocorua stands as the sentinel at the south- 
east gate. Paugus lifted, a blue-black, toppling 
wave to westward, seemingly near enough to 
fall upon Chocorua summit, while over its 
shoulder peered Passaconaway flanked with 



12 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

Tripyramid and White Face. Northward and 
westward from these toppled the pinnacles of 
jumbled, blue-black waves of land that passed 
beyond the power of vision. Northward again 
the glance touched summit after summit of this 
dark sea of mountains till the crests lifted and 
broke in the white foam of the Presidential 
Range with Mount Washington towering, glitter- 
ing and glacial, above them all. Here was no 
steam of spring to soften the outlines and blur 
the distance in blue. Rather the crystal clearness 
of the winter air still lingered there, and though 
but a few drifts of December's snow lay on 
Chocorua and none were to be seen on the other, 
nearer mountains, Carrigain was white crested 
and Washington topped the ermine of the Presi- 
dential range like a magical iceberg floating 
majestically on a sea of driven foam. Cho- 
corua is not a very high mountain. Three thou- 
sand feet it springs suddenly into the blue from 
the lake at its feet, 3508 feet is its height above 
the sea level, but its splendid isolation and the 
sharpness of its pinnacle give one on its summit 
a sense of height and of exaltation far greater 



UP CHOCORUA 13 

than that to be obtained from many a summit 
that is in reahty far higher. 

Yet to him who stays long on the summit 
of Chocorua thus early in the spring is apt to 
come a certain sense of sadness, following the 
exaltation of spirits, sadness for the inevitable 
passing of this inspiring pinnacle. The work 
of alternating heat and cold, of sun and rain, 
are everywhere visible, beating the granite dome 
to flinders and carrying it down into the valley 
below. The bare granite shows the sledgeham- 
mer blows of the frost as if a giant had been 
at work on it making repousse work with the 
weapon of Thor. Not a square foot of the sky- 
facing ledges but has felt the welts of this 
hammer of the frost, each lifting a flake of the 
stone, from the size of one's thumbnail to that 
of a broad palm. These crumble into nodules 
of angular granite that make drifts of coarse 
sand even on the very summit. The sweep of 
the wind and the rush of the rain come and 
send these in streams down the mountain side. 
The rain and the water of melted snow do an- 



14 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

other work of destruction, also. Such water has 
a strong solvent power, even on the grim gran- 
ite. Always after rain or during the snow- 
melting season of early spring, there is a little 
basin full of this water in the bare rock just 
northeast of the very summit. There it stands 
till the winds blow it away or the thirsty sun 
dries it up, and year after year it has dissolved 
a little of the rock on which it rests till it has 
worn quite a basin in the granite, — a basin 
which looks singularly as if it had been hollowed 
roughly out by mallet and chisel. So the work 
goes on, and Chocorua summit is appreciably 
lowered, century by century. 

Fortunately man thinks in years and not in 
geological epochs, else the sadness of the thought 
were more poignant. After all, the work of 
erosion of the centuries to come can never be so 
great on the mountain as that of the centuries 
that have passed, for the geologists tell us that 
all the summits of the Appalachians were once 
but valleys in the vast table-land which tow- 
ered far higher above them than they now do 
above the sea. The forces of erosion whose 



UP CHOCORUA 15 

patient work one now sees on Chocorua summit 
have hammered at the hills thus long. So wears 
the world away, but the great square block which 
sits on the very peak of the mountain shows none 
of the bruises which fleck the soft granite below 
it, and it may well be many a thousand years 
before it slides down into the ravine below. 

The black bulks of Paugus and the mountains 
beyond were rimmed with the crimson fire of 
the westering sun as I reluctantly climbed down 
from the peak of this hill of enchantment, 
greeted by the evensongs of the juncos and 
myrtle warblers in the first broad patches of 
spruce about the base of the cone. A pigeon 
hawk swung up from the westerly ravine and 
hovered a moment so near me that I could see 
the white tip of his tail and the rusty neck 
collar, then slid down the air and vanished in 
the ravine on the opposite side of the mountain. 
He builds his nest on mountains and was well 
fitted to show me the easiest way down. I 
grudged him his wings as I waked the yelps in 
a new set of leg muscles, slumping down the 



i6 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

slopes and climbing laboriously down the almost 
perpendicular, rocky ravines. The Hammond 
trail is no primrose path, for all its beauties, and 
it was my first climb of the year. I was glad 
indeed to drink deep of the mountain brook 
near the end of the trail and then rest a bit 
to the soothing contralto of its song. 

The shadowy coolness of the evening was 
welling up and blotting the gold of sunset from 
the treetops as I rounded Chocorua Lake and 
watched the sunset fire the summit where I had 
lingered so long, — a fire reflected deep in the 
very heart of the mirroring waters. The roar 
of the little river on its way down to Chocorua 
town came faintly to me, a sleepy song, half 
that of the wind in pines, half an echo of dron- 
ing bees that work all day in the willow blooms 
by its side. Liquid, clear, through this came the 
songs of wood thrushes out of the shadows. 
The peace of God was tenderly wrapping all the 
world in night, and the mountain loomed farther 
and farther away in blue mystery and dignity, 
while from its pinnacle slowly faded the rosy 
glow of the passing, perfect day. 



II 

BOBOLINK MEADOWS 

Early June about Jackson Falls and Thorn 
Mountain 

On a May morning after rain the bobolinks 
came to the meadows up under the shadow of 
Thorn Mountain. The morning stars had sung 
together and the breaking of day let tinkling 
fragments of their music through, or so it 
seemed. Something of the sleighbell melodies 
that have jingled over New Hampshire hills all 
winter was in this music, something of the happy 
laughter of sweet-voiced children, and some- 
thing more that might be an echo of harps 
touched in holy heights. Surelv it is good to 
be in the mountains at dawn in May, when such 
sweet tinklings of melody fall out of celestial 
spaces! The high hills were veiled in the mists 
of the storm that had passed, but the nearer 
summit of Thorn leaned friendly out of them, 



i8 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

and over it from the south pitched the frag- 
ments of heavenly music, fluttering down on 
short v^ings Hke those of cherubs. The boboHnks 
had come to Jackson. 

It is as easy to beheve that the cherubs of 
Raphael and Rubens can make the journey from 
high heaven to earth on their chubby wings as 
that these short-winged, slow-fluttering birds 
can have come from the marshes below the 
Amazon on theirs, but so they have done, find- 
ing their music on the way. They went south 
in early September, brown, inconspicuous seed- 
eaters with never a note save a metallic " chink." 
Somewhere in the far south they found new 
plumage of black with plumes of white and old 
gold. Somewhere in the sapphire heights of air 
above the Caribbean Sea they caught the tin- 
kling music of the spheres and dropped upon 
Florida with it in the very last days of April, 
bringing it thence again in joyous flight that 
drops them among the mountain meadows in 
mid May. 

Now June is making the grass long about the 
little brown nests where the brown mother-bird 



BOBOLINK MEADOWS 19 

sits so close, but the meadows are full of tin- 
kling echoes of celestial music still. All the 
mountain world is rapturous with this same joy 
of something more than life which the bobo- 
links brought from on high in their songs, danc- 
ing and singing with it and tossing something 
of beauty skyward day and night. Round the 
margins of the bobolink meadows the apple trees 
have completed their adoration of bloom, the 
strewing of incense and purity of white petals 
down the wind, and now yearn skyward with 
tenderness of young leaves. The meadow vio- 
lets smile bravely blue from shy nooks, and the 
snow that lingered so long on the slopes is born 
again in the gentler white of houstonias which 
frost the short grasses with star-dust bloom. 
All the heat of the dandelion suns that blaze in 
fiery constellations round the margins cannot 
melt away this lace-work of the houstonias, and 
it is not till the buttercups come, too, and focus 
the sun rays from their glazed petals of gold 
that the last frost of the season, that of the 
houstonia blooms, is melted away. Dearly as the 
bobolink loves his brown mate in the nest, the 



20 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

moist maze beneath the grass culms where he 
dines, and his swaying perch on the ferns that 
feather the meadow's edge, he, too, feels this 
upward impulse within him too strong to resist 
and continually flutters skyward, quivering with 
the joy of June and setting the air from hill 
to hill a-bubble with his song. 

The bobolink meadows begin on the grassy 
levels between the Ellis and Wildcat rivers, the 
bottom land which forms the foothold of Jack- 
son town, and they climb the mountains in all 
directions as do the summer visitors, scattering 
laughter and beauty as they go, till you hear the 
tinkle of the bobolink's song and find the beauty 
of meadow blooms in tiny nooks well up toward 
the very summits. Up here the shyest meadow 
birds and sweetest meadow flowers seem to love 
the rough rocks well and climb them by the 
route that the brooks take as they prattle down 
from the high springs. Up the very rivers they 
troop, and though they turn aside eagerly to the 
safer haven of the brook sides, they climb as 
well by way of the boulders that breast the 
roar of the bigger streams. The Wildcat River 




f^ 



w 



o 



BOBOLINK MEADOWS 21 

plunges right down into Jackson village by way 
of Jackson Falls, a thousand-foot slope over 
granite ledges worn smooth with flood, and 
mighty boulders scattered in bewildering con- 
fusion. In time of freshet this long incline is 
a welter of uproarious foam. This year a long 
spring drought has bared the rocks in many 
places, and one may climb the length of the falls 
as the stream comes down, from ledge to ledge 
and from boulder to boulder. 

The rush of the water drowns the warbling 
of the water-thrushes in the alders and vibur- 
nums on the banks, it drowns the cool melodies 
that the wood thrushes sing from the deep shade 
of the wooded slopes along the stream, but noth- 
ing has drowned the wild flowers that climb the 
falls by way of the ledges and boulders as the 
adventurous fisherman does. Why the whelm- 
ing rush of freshets has not wiped them out of 
existence it is hard to say. There must be times 
each year when they are buried deep beneath 
the boiling foam, but there they cling this June 
and smile up in the sun and take the fresh scent 
of the churning waters as a strong basis for 



22 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

their perfumes. They knew the tricks of the 
perfumer's trade long before there were per- 
fumers, and the moisture of the flood itself is 
their ambergris. Here the cranberry tree leans 
over the water and drops the white petals of 
the neutral blooms from its broad, flat cymes to 
go over one fall after another on their way to 
Ellis River and, later, the Saco. The gentle 
meadow-sweet dares far more than this. It 
grows from slender cracks in the face of per- 
pendicular granite, and with but rocks and water 
for its roots thrives and bathes its serrate leaves 
in the spray. The mountain blueberries have set 
their feet in similar places and hang fascicles 
of white bells over the water for the more dar- 
ing of the bumblebees that have their nests in 
the moss of the river banks. 

Showiest and boldest of all is the rhodora 
which has taken possession of a rock island in 
midstream well up the falls. Here in a tangle 
of rock points and driftwood it grows in clumps 
and puts out its umbel clusters of richest rose, 
a mist of petals that seems to have caught and 
held one of the rainbow tints from the spray 



BOBOLINK MEADOWS 27, 

that dashes by the blooms on either side. Nor 
is even this, with its showy beauty that Emerson 
loved, the loveliest thing to be found growing 
out of granite in the very tumult of the waters. 
The blue violet is there, unseen from the bank 
but smiling shyly up to him who will clamber 
out to midstream, finding coigns of vantage 
down where even at low water the splash of 
spray sprinkles its pointed leaves and violet-blue 
flowers. Viola cucullata is common to all moist 
meadows and stream margins from Canada to 
the South, but nowhere does it bloom more 
cheerily and confidingly than in the midst of the 
rush and roar of Jackson Falls in these danger 
spots among the rocks. One clump I found in 
a square well of granite in the very wildest up- 
roar, holding its sprays of bloom bravely up in 
a spot that at every freshet must be fairly 
whelmed with volumes of whirling icy water. 
How it holds this place at such times only the 
clinging, fibrous roots and the gray granite that 
they embrace can tell, but there it is, blooming 
as sweetly and contentedly as in any sheltered, 
grassy meadow in all the land. 



24 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

Up from the bridge above Jackson Falls the 
road climbs by one bobolink meadow after an- 
other along the slope of Tin Mountain till it 
stops at the wide clearing on the higher shoul- 
der of Thorn, which was once the Gerrish farm. 
Farm it is no longer, for the farmers are long 
gone. The jaw-post of the old well-sweep leans 
decrepitly over the well, which is choked with 
rubbish. The weight of winter snow and the 
rush of summer rain have long since broken 
through the roof of the old house and are 
steadily carrying it down into the earth from 
which it sprang. The chimney swifts have de- 
serted the crumbled chimney, and the barn swal- 
lows no longer nest in the barn, last signs of 
the passing of a homestead, and even the phoebes 
have gone to newer habitations, but the broad 
acres are still strong in fertility and the grass 
grows lush and green on the gentle slopes. 
Down from Thorn summit and over from Tin 
the forest advances, but hesitatingly. It is as 
if it still had memory of the strokes of the 
pioneer's axe and did not yet dare an invasion 
of the land he marked off. It sends out skirm- 



BOBOLINK MEADOWS 25 

ishers, plumed young knights of spruce and fir, 
scouts of white birch and yellow, of maple and 
beech, to spy out the land, and where these have 
found no enemy it is advancing, meaning to 
take peaceful possession, no doubt, for the wild 
cherries and berry bushes mingle with the old 
apple trees, and both hold out white blossom 
flags of truce. 

One wonders if the pioneer did not have an 
eye for mountain scenery as well as for strong", 
rich land, for from the very doorstone of the 
old house the glance sweeps a quarter of the 
horizon, scores of miles from one blue peak to 
another. At one's feet lies Jackson as if in a 
well among the hills. Eagle Mountain and Spruce 
and the ridges beyond dividing the valley of the 
Wildcat from the glen of Ellis River, yet not 
rising high enough to hide the peak of Wildcat 
Mountain, up between Carter and Pinkham 
notches. Iron Mountain rises on the left of 
Jackson, and beyond it the unnamed peaks of 
Rocky Branch Ridge lead the eye on to the 
snow still white in the ravines of the Presiden- 
tial Range and Mount Washington looming in 



26 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

serene dignity to the northwest. One may chmb 
thus far on Thorn Mountain by carriage if he 
will, or by motor car indeed, provided he has 
a good hill climber. The ascent is often made 
thus. But to get to the very summit, the point 
of the thorn, a footpath way leads up through 
the bars into the pioneer's pasture, onward and 
upward through the forest. 

The pasture ferns climb too, and the pasture 
birds love the wooded summit as well as they 
do the slopes far below the pioneer's farm. The 
June delight which echoes in the bobolink music 
in the meadows so far below sweeps up the 
mountain-side in scent and song and color till 
it blossoms from the Puritan spruces on the very 
top of Thorn. There one glimpses the rare out- 
pouring of joy that comes from reticent natures. 
They are in love, these prim black spruces, and 
they cannot wholly hide it however hard they 
try. Instead they tremble into bloom at the 
twig tips, and what were brown and sombre 
buds become nodding blossoms of gold that thrill 
to the fondling of wind and sun and scatter 
incense of yellow pollen all down the mountain- 



BOBOLINK MEADOWS 27 

side. In the distance they are prim and black- 
robed still, but to go among them is to see that 
they wear this yellow pollen robe in honor of 
June, a shimmering transparent silk of palest 
cloth of gold. More than that, their highest 
plumes blush into pink shells of acceptance of 
joy, pistillate blooms of translucent rose as dear 
and wondrous in their colors of dawn as any 
shells born of crystalline tides, in tropic seas, 
blossoms whose fulfilment shall be prim brown 
cones, but each of which is now a fairy Venus, 
born of the golden foam of June joy which 
mantles the slender trees. Only with the com- 
ing of June to the mountains can one believe 
this of the spruces, because seeing it he knows 
it true. 

The little god of love has shot his arrow to 
the hearts of the trembling spruces, and he sings 
among their branches in many forms. The black- 
burnian warbler lisps his high-pitched " zwee- 
zwee-zwee-se-ee-ee " all up the slope of Thorn 
to the summit and shows his orange throat and 
breast in vivid color among the dark leaves. 



28 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

The black-throated green, moving nervously about 
with a black stock over his white waistcoat, sings 
his six little notes, and the magnolia warbles 
hurriedly and excitedly his short, rapidly ut- 
tered song. The mourning warbler imitates the 
water-thrush of the misty banks of Jackson 
Falls, and the Connecticut warbler echoes in 
some measure the " witchery, witchery " of the 
Maryland yellow-throats, both birds that have 
elected to stay behind with the bobolinks. 

Thus carolled through cool shadows where the 
striped moosewood hangs its slender racemes of 
green blossoms, you come rather suddenly out 
on the bare ledges which face northerly from 
the summit. Truly to see the mountains best 
one should look at the big ones from the little 
ones. Here is the same view that Gerrish had 
from his farm, only that you have a wider 
sweep of horizon. Over the Rocky Branch 
Ridge to the westward rises the Montalban 
Range, with the sun swinging low toward Parker 
and Resolution and getting ready to climb down 
the Giant's Stairs and vanish behind Jackson 
and Webster. Everywhere peak answers to 



BOBOLINK MEADOWS 29 

peak, and you look over low banks of mist that 
float upward from unknown glens, forming level 
clouds on which the summits seem to sit en- 
throned like deities of a pagan world. There 
is little of the bleak debris of battle with wind 
and cold on the summit of Thorn. It is but 
2265 feet above sea level, lower than most of 
the mountains about it, and the trees that climb 
to its top and shut off the view to the east and 
south are in no wise dwarfed by the struggle 
to maintain themselves there. But from it one 
gets a far better outlook on mountain grandeur 
than from many a greater height. Washington 
holds the centre of the stage which one here 
views from a balcony seat, seeming to rise in 
splendid dignity from the glen down which the 
Ellis River flows, and it is no wonder that there 
is a well-worn path from the Gerrish farm to 
the point of the Thorn. 

It may be that the pioneer who first hewed 
the mountain farm from the forest also first trod 
this path to the very summit of the little moun- 
tain. It may be that he got a wide enough 



30 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

sweep of the great hills on the horizon to the 
north and west from his own doorstone. But 
I like to think that once in a while, of a Sun- 
day afternoon perhaps, he went to the peak and 
dreamed dreams of greater empire and higher 
aspirations even than his mountain farm held 
for him. There is a tonic in the air and an 
inspiration in the outlook from these summits 
that should make great and good men of us all. 
These linger long in the memory after the 
climb. But longer perhaps even than the hopes 
the summit gives will linger in the memory of 
him who climbs Thorn Mountain in early June 
the recollection of two things, one at least not 
of the summit. The first is the joy of June in 
the bobolink meadows far down toward Jack- 
son Falls, the celestial melodies that the bobo- 
links echo as they flutter upward in the vivid 
sunshine and sing again to mingle their white 
and gold with that of the flowers that bloom 
the meadow through. The other is the bewilder- 
ing beauty of the once black and sombre spruces 
in their sudden draperies of golden staminate 
bloom, looped and crowned with the pistillate 



BOBOLINK MEADOWS 31 

shells which so soon will be prim brown cones. 
The bobolinks will sing in the meadows for 
many weeks. The mountains will blossom with 
one color after another till late September brings 
the miracle of autumn leaves to set vast ranges 
aflame from glen to summit, but only for a little 
time are the spruces so filled with the full tide 
of happiness that they put on their veils of dia- 
phanous gold and their rosy ornaments of new- 
born cones. It is worth a trip into the hills 
and a long climb to see these at their best, which 
is when the bobolinks have eggs in the brown 
nests in the meadow grass and the blue violets 
are smiling up from the rock crevices in the 
midst of the tumult of Jackson Falls. 



Ill 

CLIMBING IRON MOUNTAIN 

Some Joys of an Easy Ascent Near Jackson 

The dawn lingers long in the depths of the 
deciduous woods that line the eastern slope of 
Iron Mountain. You may hear the thrushes 
singing matins in the green gloom after the sun 
has peered over Thorn and lighted the grassy 
levels in the hollow where Jackson wakes to the 
carols of field-loving birds. The veery is the 
bellman to this choir, ringing and singing at the 
same time, unseen in the shadows, the notes of 
bell and song mingling in his music till the two 
are one, the very tocsin of a spirit in the high 
arches of the dim woodland temple, calling all to 
prayer. The wood thrushes respond, serene in 
the knowledge of all good, voices of pure and 
holy calm, rapturous indeed, but only with the 
pure joy of worship and thoughts of things 
most high. So it is with the hermit thrushes 



CLIMBING IRON MOUNTAIN 33 

that sing with them, nor shall you know the 
voice of the hermit from that of the wood thrush 
by greater purity of tone or exaltation of spirit, 
though perhaps it falls to the hermits to voice 
the more varied passages of the music. Of all 
bird songs that of these thrushes seems to be 
most worshipful and to touch the purest re- 
sponsive chords in the human heart. As they 
lead the wayfarer's spirit upward, so they seem 
to lead his feet toward the mountain top, the 
cool forest shades where they sing alternating 
with sunny glades as he scales the heights with 
the mountain road, which climbs prodigiously. 

Way up the mountain the sunny glades widen 
in places to mountain farms, their pastures set 
on perilous slants, so that one wonders if the 
cattle do not sometimes roll down till checked 
by the woodland growth below, but their cul- 
tivated fields more nearly level, spots seemingly 
crushed out of the slopes by the weight of giant 
footsteps, descending. The wooded growth and 
ledges of the summit leap upward from the 
southern and western edges of these clearings, 
but to the north and east the glance passes into 



34 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

crystal mountain air and penetrates it mile on 
mile to the blue summits that cut the horizon 
in these directions. Far below lie the valleys, 
with the smaller hills that seem so high from 
the grassy plains about Jackson village smudged 
and flattened from crested land waves to rip- 
ples. Highest of all mountain cots is the Hayes 
farm-house, its well drawing ice water from 
frozen caverns deep in the heart of the height 
and its northern outlook such as should breed 
heroes and poets through living cheek by jowl 
with sublimity. Here the mighty swell of the 
mountain sea has sunk the rippling hills below, 
but the sweep of crested land waves leaps on, 
high above them. Looking eastward, one seems 
to be watching from the lift and roll of an 
ocean liner's prow as the great ship runs down 
a gale. Out from far beneath you and beyond 
roar toppling blue crests, ridge piling over ridge. 
Thorn Mountain, Tin and Eagle are the nearer 
waves, their outline rising and falling and show- 
ing beyond them Black Mountain and the two 
summits of Doublehead, and beyond them Shaw 
and Gemini and Sloop, great billows rising and 



CLIMBING IRON MOUNTAIN 35 

rolling on. Down upon the forest foam left 
behind in the hollows of these rides the Carter 
Moriah Range, a jagged, onrushing ridge, driven 
by the same gale. The day may be calm to all 
senses but the eye, yet there is the sea beneath 
you and beyond, tossed mountain high by the 
tempest. 

To turn from the tumult to things near by 
is to find the forests of the mountain coming 
down through the pastures to look in friendly 
fashion over the walls at the clean mowing fields. 
On these they do not encroach, and though they 
continually press in upon the pastures and nar- 
row their boundaries they do it gently and with 
such patient urbanity that the open spaces hardly 
know when they cease to be and the woodland 
occupies them. The flowers of the pasture sun- 
shine grow thus for years in the forest shadows 
before they realize that they are out of place 
and hasten back to seek the full sunshine, and 
the trillium and clintonia and a host of other 
shade-loving things move out into the open and 
mingle with the buttercups and blue violets, sure 



36 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

that the trees will follow them. Thus gently 
does nature repair the ravages that have been 
wrought by the hand of man. ,Yet all through 
the mountain region she moves on, and fewer 
farms nestle in the giants' footfall on the high 
ridges than were there fifty or a hundred years 
ago. In many cases the summer hotel or the 
summer residence has taken the place of the 
one-time farm-house, but the dwellers in these 
encourage the wood rather than hold it at bay. 
The lumbermen make sad havoc among the big 
trees, but the forest acreage is greater in the 
mountains now than it was a century ago, more 
than making up in breadth what it loses in 
height. 

In this low growth of the pastures about the 
farms high on Iron Mountain the June sunshine 
seems to pass into living forms of plant and 
animal life. Not only do the dandelions and 
buttercups blossom with their gold in all the 
moist, rich soil, but out of the green of forest 
leaves and the deep shadows of the wood it 
flutters upon quivering wings. The yellow 
warblers that flit and sing vigorously among the 



CLIMBING IRON MOUNTAIN Z7 

young birches are touched with the ohve of the 
gentler shadows, but as they sing their vigor- 
ous '' Wee-chee, chee, chee, cher-wee " their 
plumage is as full of the sunshine gold as are 
the dandelion blooms. The myrtle warblers of 
the spiring spruces, the magnolias, Blackburn- 
ians, mourning, Canadian and Wilson's, are 
flecked with it, and the forest shadows that 
touch them too only seem to bring it out the 
more clearly. But these are birds of the wood 
or its edges. In the trees that stand clear of 
the forest the goldfinches sing as if they were 
canaries, caged within the limits of the farm, 
their gold the brightest of all that which the 
birds show, the black of their wings densest, the 
color of night in the bottom of the glen, under 
evergreens. The thrushes that sing in the deep 
woods far down the mountain chant prayers, 
even until noon, the warblers in a thousand trees 
twitter simple ditties that are the mother-goose 
melodies of the forest world, cosy, fireside re- 
frains hummed over and over again, but the 
goldfinches are the choristers of the summer 
sunshine when it floods the open spaces. They 



38 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

seem to be the familiar bird spirits of summer 
on the little mountain farms. 



As the sunshine blossoms from the mountain 
meadows, as it flits and sings in the forest 
margins and in the goldfinch-haunted trees of 
the open farm, so it is born even from the twigs 
in the deeper wood, far up above the highest 
farm on the way to the summit of Iron Moun- 
tain. Great yellow butterflies, tiger swallowtails, 
flutter in the dapple of light and shadow, their 
gold the sunlight that flows across them as they 
sail by. A few days ago not one of these soar- 
ing beauties was in all the woodland; then, of 
a day, the place was alive with them. Born of 
chrysalids that have wintered under dry bark 
and in the shelter of rocks and fallen leaves, 
passing unharmed through gales and cold that 
registered forty below and six feet of hardened 
snow? Nonsense! Watch the play of sunlight 
on young leaves of transparent green. See it 
flame with shining gold, stripe them with rip- 
pling shadows of twigs, and then see the whole 
quiver into free life and flutter away, a tiger- 



CLIMBING IRON MOUNTAIN 39 

swallowtail butterfly, and believe these spirits 
of the woodland shadows are born in any other 
way, if you can. Papilio turnus may come out 
as chrysalids in scientists' insectaries, but these 
woodland sprites are born of the love of sun- 
shine for young leaves and quiver into June to 
be the first messengers of the full tide of sum- 
mer, which neither comes up to the mountains 
from the south nor falls to them from the sky, 
but is a miracle of the same desire. 

It is for such miracles that the young shoots 
of the forest undergrowth ask as they come forth 
each year with their tender leaves clasped like 
hands in prayer. Through May you shall see 
this attitude of supplication in the young growth 
all along the mountain-sides where the shade of 
the woods is deep, and it lingers with the later- 
growing shrubs and herbs even until this sea- 
son. Most devout of these seems the ginseng, 
its trinity of arms coming from the mould in 
this prayerful attitude, and now that these have 
spread wide to receive the good and perfect gifts 
that they know are coming the trinity of leaflets 
at their tips are still clasped most humbly. So 



40 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

it is with the bellwort and the Solomon's seal 
and many another gentle herb of the shadows. 
Their leaf hands are clasped in prayer as they 
come forth, and their heads are bowed in humble 
adoration all summer long. The joy of warmth 
and the sweetness of summer rain are theirs 
already, and one might think it was for these 
creature comforts that the prayer had been. But 
it was not. It was, and is, for grace of bloom 
and the dear delight of ripening fruit, the one 
deep wish of all the world. 

The very summit of Iron Mountain, 2725 feet 
above the sea level, is a plateau of broken rock, 
scattered over solid ledges which protrude 
through the debris. Trees and shrubs of the 
slopes and the lowland have climbed to this 
plateau, poplar and birch, bird cherry, sumac, 
dwarf blueberries and alder, that find a footing 
here and there among the crevices. Spruces, 
somewhat dwarfed and scattered but spiring 
primly, are there, too, and the whole concourse 
makes the bleak rock glade-like and friendly, yet 
do not altogether obstruct the outlook. The 
breath of summer has pinked the young cones 



CLIMBING IRON MOUNTAIN 41 

on the spruce tops and robed them in the gold 
of pollen-bearing catkins. It has set silver re- 
flections shimmering from the young leaves of 
poplar and birch, and the dwarf blueberries are 
pearled with white bloom. Other spirits of 
summer are among these; alert, frantically 
hasty skipper butterflies dash about among them, 
and a big, lank mountain variety of bumblebee 
drones from clump to clump, showing a broad 
band of deep orange across the gold and black 
of his back. He is a big and husky mountaineer 
of a bee, but buzzing with him comes a clear- 
wing moth, the spring form of the snowberry 
clearwing. Hsemorrhagia diflinis, if I am not 
mistaken, though I hardly expected to find this 
little day-flying moth at so great an elevation so 
far north. The very spirit of summer, the tiger- 
swallowtail butterfly, was there, too, hovering 
confidingly at the tip of my pencil as I wrote 
about him, and with him the black, gold-banded 
Eastern swallowtail, Papilio asterias, these two 
the largest butterflies of the summit. Of all 
the insect life, large or small, that revelled in 
the vivid sunlight of the thin air of the little 



42 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

plateau the most numerous were the httle blue- 
bottle flies that hummed there in swarms, very 
busy about their business, whatever it was, fill- 
ing the air with glints of the deepest, most scin- 
tillant azure. 

But he who climbs Iron Mountain will not 
linger too long with the summer denizens of its 
little rocky plateau. From the cairn which 
mountaineers have built of its loose rocks the 
eye has a wide sweep of the mountain world 
in every direction. To the south the land fades 
into shadowy mountains far down the Ossipee 
Valley, mountains that seem to float there in a 
soft, violet haze as if they were but massed 
bloom of the Gulf Stream that flows and gives 
off its wondrous colors half a thousand miles 
farther on. East the tossing sea is dappled with 
green and blue as the cloud shadows follow one 
another over the forest growth. West the peaks 
against the sun loom blue-black and stern as 
they climb northward into the Presidential 
Range, lifting their summits over the rough 
ridge of the Montalban Range till one wonders 



CLIMBING IRON MOUNTAIN 43 

what wildernesses lie in the shadowy ravines 
between the two. But whether to the east or 
the west the gaze still falls upon a surging sea 
of forest-clad granite, the very picture of tu- 
multuous motion, till the cairn beneath the gazer 
takes on the semblance of a mainmast-head on 
which he stands, and from which the plunge 
of the ship may at any moment send him whirl- 
ing into space. 

To look northward from this main-truck is 
to get a further insight into the mystery of the 
motion. Here, as the clouds blow away from 
the upper slopes of the highest peak, the sem- 
blance of a tossing sea vanishes, and one seems 
to understand what happened here in an age 
long gone. Once upon a time this mountain 
earth must have been fluid, one thinks, and the 
wind have blown an antediluvian gale from the 
northwest. It sent great waves of earth toss- 
ing and rolling and riding southeast before it, 
with clouds for crests and the blue haze of dis- 
tance for the scurrying spindrift. Then uprose 
from the depths of this awful sea Mount Wash- 
ington, enthroned on the Presidential Range, 



44 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

" clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful," 
and commanded the tumult to cease. There it 
stands. 

It stands, not only in the rock but in the im- 
agination of the onlooker, once he has found 
the dignity and grandeur of the highest sum- 
mit, for authority. Dignity and grandeur are 
the impressions which come to one from the 
north through the crystal clear, thin air out of 
the cool, snow-samite which still stands in the 
deep ravines even on the southerly slope of the 
master mountain, just as illusion and romance 
dwell in the violet haze which veils all the south 
in pleasing mystery. Here on Iron Mountain 
one is lifted high in air between the two and 
able with a turn of the head to see either, and 
again it should be said that to know the moun- 
tains well it is best to see them from the lesser 
summits of their ranges. From every one of 
these they stand before the onlooker in new as- 
pects, so different each from each that they 
seem new peaks whose acquaintance he has not 
hitherto made. Only thus is their many-sided 
completeness revealed and their full personality 




B .S 

O rt 



=3 a 

r-" "T* 



•o 6 



CLIMBING IRON MOUNTAIN 45 

brought out. Nor need the visitor be among 
them long before he reahzes that they have per- 
sonaHty and grow to be individual friends, as 
well loved and as ardently longed for when ab- 
sent as any human neighbor or associate. Within 
them dwell a deep kindliness and a strength 
which goes out to those who love them, unfail- 
ing and unvarying through the years. It is no 
wonder that prophets seek them, and that within 
the sheltering arms of their ridges are cosy 
nooks where hermits build their hermitages and 
find a deep peace which the cities of the world 
deny them. 

From nowhere does one get a better view of 
Kearsarge than from this little cairn on the 
plateau which is the summit of Iron Mountain. 
The long ridge which rises from the east branch 
of the Saco to Bartlett Mountain and goes on 
and up to make the summit of Kearsarge stands 
with its edge toward him and vanishes against 
the mountain itself, leaving its outline that of 
a narrow cone, rising abruptly from a plain 
below. There is something spectacular in its 
dizzy, abrupt loom into the sky, quivering in 



46 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

gray haze against the violet depths beyond, mak- 
ing of it a magic peak such as the early voy- 
agers of legendary times saw and viewed with 
fear and wonder. Such a mountain as this 
seems was the lodestone which drew the ship 
of Sinbad from the sea to be wrecked on its 
base, and over it at any time might come flying 
a roc with the palace of a prince of India in 
its talons. 

The sun that sinks to his setting behind the 
great ridges that wall in Crawford Notch sets 
their peaks in eruption, black smoke of clouds 
rising from them and glowing with the reflec- 
tion of lakes of lava below and the flicker of 
long flames. The Presidential Range looms and 
withdraws in mighty solemnity and dignity, lost 
in the turbid glow of this semblance of what 
may have happened in aeons gone, but the re- 
flection of these fires only deepens the ame- 
thystine gray of Kearsarge and the purple 
gloom beyond it, while it touches the very sum- 
mit with a soft rose, a flower of mystery as 
sweet as any that ever bloomed in legendary 
lore. When the watcher on the peak sees these 



CLIMBING IRON MOUNTAIN 47 

signs, it is time to begin the descent to the deep- 
ening shadows far down the mountain, where 
the thrushes are singing vespers in tuneful 
adoration, prayerfully thankful for a holy day 
well spent. 



IV 

JUNE ON KEARSARGE 

Butterflies and Flowers on a Summit of 
Splendid Isolation 

The familiar spirits of Kearsarge Mountain 
this June seemed to me to be the white admiral 
butterflies. Clad in royal purple are these with 
buttons of red and azure and broad white epau- 
lettes which cross both wings. These greeted 
me in the highway at Lower Bartlett and there 
was almost always one in sight up Bartlett 
Mountain, over the ledges and to the very top 
of Kearsarge itself. One of them politely 
showed me the wrong wood road as a start for 
the trail up Bartlett which leaves the highway 
just a little south of the east branch of the Saco. 
Then when the road' ended in a vast tangle of 
slash and new growth he showed me what was 
to him a perfectly good trail still, up in the air 
and over the tops of the trees and ledges in easy 



JUNE ON KEARSARGE 49 

flight, and I dare say he thought me very dull 
that I did not follow as easily as he led. It is 
the season for white admirals and you may meet 
them in favored places all over the mountains 
from now on, but nowhere have I seen them so 
plentiful as they are this June along the slopes 
of Bartlett and Kearsarge. A South American 
navy could not have more admirals. 

With the white admirals I find, flying lower 
and keeping well in shadowy nooks, a thumb- 
nail butterfly which might well be a midship- 
man, he is so much a copy on a small scale of 
the admiral, very dark in ground color and hav- 
ing white epaulettes across both wings also. 
This butterfly is new to me, nor do I find him 
figured in such works on lepidoptera as I have 
been able to consult since I have seen him. I 
had to get lost on the way up Bartlett to find 
him most plentiful, but his fellows are common 
throughout the shady woodlands of the upper 
branches of the Saco from Pinkham Notch to 
the borders of the Conway meadows. In fact 
I fancy the whole White Mountain region is a 
school for these understudies of the white ad- 



50 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

mirals, and they certainly could have no more 
noble exemplar. 

No doubt my volunteer white admiral guide 
had a great contempt for any would-be sailor 
that could not climb as he did when he went 
straight toward the main truck of Kearsarge 
by way of the bobstay, but he left me where the 
lumber road did, in a wild tangle of slash, to 
get up the mountain the way the bear does, on 
all fours. There is a path up Bartlett, a proper 
one that enters from the highway as the A. M. C. 
guide says it does and sticks to its job after the 
first third of the ascent is accomplished, but the 
way it flirts with the wood roads between these 
two points is bewildering to the sober-minded 
stranger who attempts to follow it. However, 
missing this slender trifler had its compensa- 
tions. I am convinced that I reached portions 
of the slope of Bartlett that are rarely visited. 
I was long getting out of the awful mess which 
lumbermen leave behind them at the upper ends 
of their roads. The inextricable confusion of 
tangled spruce tops and the sudden riot of new 
deciduous growth, wild with delight over the 




q H 



JUNE ON KEARSARGE 51 

flood of sunshine it gets, held me as if in a net. 
And all the time I wrestled ' with it an indigo 
bunting sat on the top of a rock maple and 
sang his surprise at seeing such a thing in such 
a place. " Dear, dear ! " he gurgled, " who is 
it? who is it? dear, dear, dear!" and once in 
a while he added a little tittering " tee, hee, hee." 
It was all very well for him. He could follow 
the white admiral if he were bound for the main 
truck of Kearsarge by way of the Bartlett bob- 
stay, and he looked very handsome and capable 
as he glistened, iridescent blue-black up there 
against the sun. How poor a creature a man 
is, after all! A box turtle could have gone up 
throueh that slash better than I did. 



'to' 



However, man wins because he keeps ever- 
lastingly at it, and I reasoned that if I kept 
climbing I would come out on top of something 
or other, and I did. On top of a pretty little 
hill, which is an outlying, northwesterly spur 
of Bartlett, a spot which gave me a glimpse of 
the dark, spruce-covered summit far above and 
a deep ravine between down into which I must 



52 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

go and begin my scramble all over again. A 
no-trail trip gives one an idea of what a moun- 
tain really is, showing him, for one thing, how 
rapidly it moves down into the valley beneath 
it. Here on steep slopes were loose masses of 
angled fragments of granite, weighing from a 
few pounds to a few tons each, broken from 
the precipices above by the frost and ready, some 
of them at least, to be toppled at a touch and 
start an avalanche. It needs but the footfall 
of a climbing deer, a bear, or a stray man to 
start one rock, or two, and it is easy to see that 
a down-rush of spring rain takes always a part 
of the mountain with it. To go up one of the 
precipitous ledges, " tooth and nail " as one 
must who misses the path, is to find how easily 
these broken chunks, separated by the frost from 
the parent rock, fall out and join the masses 
below. 

Yet such a climb has its joys, which the path 
does not always give. Here the deer have 
browsed and left prints of slender hoofs in the 
black earth beneath the trees, there the white 
hare had his lair all winter, a jutting rock 



JUNE ON KEARSARGE 53 

sheltering him and the sun from the southwest 
warming him as he crouched. Here are holes 
where the porcupines have scratched their 
bristly way, or a cave where perhaps a bear had 
his den. This the wandering stranger views 
with suspicion and approaches with many de- 
lightful thrills strangely compounded of hope 
and fear. Probably there are no bears on 
Bartlett, but what if there were one, and noth- 
ing for defence but the majesty of the human 
eye! A man is apt to get his own measure in 
places like these. Of course the bear, if there 
be one, will run — but which way? In the wild- 
est glen, filled with rough dens and suspicions 
of bears of the largest size, I found grateful 
traces of at least the former presence of men, 
men in bulk, so to speak. Here, in the forest 
tangle, wreathed with mountain moosewood 
blooms, was a good-sized cook-stove. There 
was no suspicion of a road, and I could only 
guess that it had wandered from a lumber camp 
and lost the trail, as I had. It reminded me 
that Bartlett summit was still distant, more 
distant perhaps than the noon hour which this 



54 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

mountain range also suggested, and it set me 
to the ascent with renewed vigor. 

All the way up in woodsy nooks where are 
little levels of rich black soil the moccasin flowers 
climb till the very top of Bartlett is reached. 
Their rose-purple foot coverings with the 
greenish-purple pointed thongs for tying seem 
scattered as if pukwudgies had lost them, flee- 
ing in terror from the bears which I could only 
suspect, the mountain top their refuge, where I 
found them, grouped rather close together in 
mossy nooks among the ledges. The dwarf cor- 
nels climb with them, finding footing in much 
the same places and stare unblinkingly up with 
round and chubby foolish faces. The cypripe- 
diums are sensitive and emotional; these that 
climb with them are strangely stolid and shal- 
low by comparison, yet they add beauty of their 
own sort to the wide, moss-carpeted stretches 
beneath the trees. On the very ledges them- 
selves neither of these advance, yet wherever 
the frosts of winter have split the rock the 
slender lints of strange lettering are green with 



JUNE ON KEARSARGE 55 

mountain cranberry vines, and the creeping 
snowberry has followed and holds rose-white 
blooms up to lure the mountain bees. The 
lichens have painted these ledges, of which the 
upper part of Bartlett Mountain is built, with 
wonderful soft colors of mingled grays and 
greens, and the spruces spire, black and beauti- 
ful, all over the summit, making one hunt for 
open spaces from which to view the world 
stretched out beneath. I found the path again 
on the ledges well up toward the summit, a 
slender, coquettish thing still, hard to follow, 
but enticing with its waywardness, its most be- 
wildering vagaries marked by former lovers, 
men of the A. M. C. without doubt, little piles 
of stone which lead him who trusts them to the 
very summit. 

Here, as on that lower spur of Bartlett which 
I had struggled to attain, one looks upon a 
greater height, with a ravine between, Kear- 
sarge looming grandly up into the sky to east- 
ward. The white admiral butterfly danced along 
here, too — or was it another ? — seemingly im- 
patient at my long delay in following, and the 



56 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

path coquettes in vain, down ledges and up 
ledges, always to be found by patient study of 
those little piles of marking stone, till, breasting 
the steep slope of Kearsarge itself, one enters 
the comparatively broad highway which leads 
up from Kearsarge village. After that the as- 
cent to Olympus is easy. 

On few mountains does one get the sense of 
exaltation and ecstatic uplift that comes to him 
when he stands on the high summit of Kear- 
sarge. The mountain is splendidly isolated, 
only Bartlett rising high near it, and the sum- 
mit of that even being so far below as to 
be readily overlooked. Northwestward looms 
Mount Washington, higher, no doubt, but so 
buttressed by the great ranges on which it sits 
serene as to lose the effect of upleap that Kear- 
sarge has. Under you is spread all eastern 
Maine, like a map, and you look northeastward 
across silver levels of lakes and mottled green 
of dwarfed hills till, shadowy on the far horizon, 
looms the peak of Katahdin, a blue land-cloud 
on the rim of the silver-flecked green sea. The 
two peaks of Doublehead are curious twin green 



JUNE ON KEARSARGE 57 

knolls below to the north, and only in the far- 
distant north and west are summits of height 
that equal or exceed your own. Far away in 
these directions they begin and pinnacle and re- 
treat, range beyond range, till they fade into 
the dim blue haze of the farthest horizon. 
Southeast lie one silver lake after another, till 
the eye finds Sebago, and beyond that the thin 
rim of the world which is Casco Bay and the 
sea. 

Much cool water must well up from the heart 
of Kearsarge to its summit, for grass grows long 
there in the hollows of the granite, and many 
alders, hung with powdery curls of staminate 
bloom and green with many leaves in mid- June. 
The moccasin flowers failed in their climb from 
Bartlett summit to reach the top of Kearsarge, 
but the rhodora has come up and set rose purple 
blooms in the same season, the leaves here push- 
ing out with the flowers instead of waiting, as 
they do in lower latitudes, at lesser heights. 
Under their caresses the mountain has smiled 
and given forth butterflies. Here are the white 
admirals, conscious with epaulettes as if they 



58 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

had just stepped ashore from the white cloud 
fleets that swing with cumulus sails piled high 
just off shore. Here is the painted lady, hover- 
ing admiringly by, seemingly unnoticed by the 
admirals. Here are tiger swallowtails, their 
gold black-barred with rippling shadows, and 
little skippers, swift and busy when the admirals 
heave in sight. Most of all I note mourning 
cloaks, and one in particular is in deep mourn- 
ing, the usual pale rim of his wings replaced 
by a brown that is so deep it is black and hides 
all azure spots that should be there. It may be 
that all these butterflies sailed up into the island 
port of a mountain top that swims so high in 
the vivid sunshine of the June afternoon that 
the air about it seems to me, watching them, 
to be a veritable transparent blue sea of great 
depth, yet it is just as likely that many were 
born on or near the summit, of generations of 
mountain dwelling lepidoptera. Of these must 
have been my black-bordered mourning cloak, 
the winter's cold having dulled his color within 
the chrysalis and giving an added depth to his 
mourning. He was as sombre as the dusky- 



JUNE ON KEARSARGE 59 

wings which dashed about with the skippers, Hke 
black slaves come to help in the lading of their 
vessels. 

Into this island port in the high air came, 
about four in the afternoon, a wind from the 
sea, cooling the intense heat and spreading a 
smoke-blue haze all along the southeastern hori- 
zon. It wiped out the coast-line of Casco Bay 
and moved the sea in with it, swallowing Sebago 
and pushing on till Lovell's Pond and the lesser 
ones within the New Hampshire line became 
estuaries at which one looked long, expecting to 
see slanting sails and smell the cool fragrance 
of tide-washed flats. Into this haze loomed 
one after another the distant Maine mountains 
and vanished as if slipping their cables and sail- 
ing away over the rim of the world, bound for 
foreign ports. A new romance of mystery had 
come to the outlook from the mountain top. 
Far up its side, borne on this cool air, came the 
song of thrushes, a jubilation of satisfied long- 
ing. The breath of the sea had come with cool 
reassurance to soothe and hearten all things. 



6o WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

On beyond Kearsarge, toward Crawford 
Notch and the Presidential Range swept this 
cod reviving air, carrying its blue haze with 
it. The low sun sent broad bands of palest blue 
down through this vapor and with it, north- 
westward, the mountains seemed to withdraw; 
details that had been so clear vanished, and in- 
stead of dapple of purple-green forest and rose- 
gray cliff were long cloud-ridges of wonderful 
deep blue riding one beyond another like waves 
on a painted sea, the darkest nearest, the farther 
paling into the farthest and that vanishing into 
the blue of the sky itself. Out of Crawford 
Notch rolled the Saco, flecking the valley below 
with patches of gleaming silver. The cumulus 
cloud fleets that had swung over the mountams 
all day long, bluing the green of the hills with 
the shadows of their canvas, swept northwest- 
ward with this wind, a great convoy for the sun 
on into the ports of the radiant west. Now one 
of them hid him from sight, its edges all gold 
with the joy of it. Again the rays flashed clear 
and the shadow of Kearsarge moved its point 
of blue a little farther out on the green of the 



JUNE ON KEARSARGE 6i 

forest to eastward. Down the mountain path 
a Bicknell's thrush sang, the veery's song, less 
round and loud and full, but with much of the 
spiral, bell-tone quality in it. It reminded me 
that the visitor to the summit who is to go 
home by way of the broad path to Kearsarge 
village may well wait till this pointed shadow 
of the summit climbs Pleasant Mountain in 
Maine and looms upward into the purple 
shadows beyond. I w^as to go back by that 
coquette of a trail down Bartlett, and the thought 
of what tricks it would play on me by moon- 
light made me hasten. 

The cool of evening w^as descending like a 
benediction on the level, elm-fringed meadows 
of Intervale, and the little village of North 
Conway gleamed white in the low sun and 
pointed the broad way down the Saco Valley 
to a hundred lakes as I climbed over the brow 
of Bartlett and clinked my heels on the ledges 
of its western face. The mocassin flowers 
nodded good night and the golden green, spiked 
blooms of the mountain moosewood waved me 
on down the path that seemed as true as slender 



62 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

as it wound on down the hill. Surely, I thought, 
holding is having, and I shall keep this little 
path close till the end of the way. And then 
it slipped from under my arm and snickered 
as it made off in the bushes, goodness knows 
where, leaving me two-thirds the way down 
Bartlett with the dusk and the tangle of forest 
all before me. However, " down hill goes mer- 
rily," and so did I, and by and by I came to a 
tiny mountain brook, and we two jogged on to- 
gether in the deepening gloom, prattling of what 
we had seen. 

At least, mountain brooks do not run away 
from you as mountain paths do, but it is as well 
not to trust them too much, after dark. This 
one led me demurely to the brink of the little 
precipice of " No-go " Falls and chuckled as it 
took the thirty- foot leap, a slim thread of silver in 
the moonlight. I dare say it was thinking what 
a fine splash I would make in the shallow pool 
below. Instead I clambered carefully around 
and made the foot of the little cliff without a 
thud, there to find that the laugh is really on 
the brook, for its leap takes it into a big iron 



JUNE ON KEARSARGE 6^ 

funnel whence it is personally conducted down 
a mile more of mountain into the little reservoir 
of the North Conway water supply. I followed 
the pipe, too, but outside, and the brook did not 
gurgle once about it all the way down. 



V 

RAIN IN THE MOUNTAINS 

The Gods, Half-Gods and Pixies to he Seen 
as the Storm Passes 

There are other beauties in the high moun- 
tains than those of fair days which show blue 
peaks pointing skyward in the infinite distance. 
Now and then a northeaster comes sweeping 
grandly down from Labrador, swathing the 
peaks in mist wraiths torn from the weltering 
waves of Baffin's Bay and the Gulf of St. 
Lawrence. Then he who kno''"^ the storm only 
from the sea level finds in it a new mystery and 
delight. On the heights you stand shoulder to 
shoulder with the clouds themselves, seeing the 
gray genie stalk from summit to summit or anon 
swoop down and bear a mountain away to cloud 
castles that build themselves in a moment and 
vanish again in a breath. At the sea level the 
storm rumbles on high above your head, tossing 
down upon you what it will ; here you are among 



RAIN IN THE MOUNTAINS 65 

the mysteries of its motion, sometimes almost 
above their level, and through rifts in the clouds 
you may get glimpses of their sun-gilded upper 
portions and see the storm as the sky does for 
a moment from above. Again the clouds coast 
to the valleys and wrap even them in the matrix 
of mist out of which rain is made. 

Most beautiful is such a storm in the hours 
of its passing, when the main cohorts have 
swept by, when the rear guard and camp fol- 
lower clouds pass at wider and wider intervals 
and more and more sun comes to paint their 
folds with rose and flash the meadows and drip- 
ping woods with scattered gems set in most vivid 
green. Far off the high hills loom mightier and 
more mysterious than ever, for their shoulders 
still pass into the storm and the imagination 
gives them unrevealed majesties of height, built 
upon the blue-black cloud plateaus that hide 
them. No wonder the great gods dwelt on 
Mount Olympus. So they do on cloud-capped 
Mount Washington, on Carrigain, Lafayette 
and Carter Dome. 

In time of storm lesser divinities may well 



66 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

come down to the valleys, and when the passing 
clouds are mingled with the coming sunshine 
is the time to look for trolls in the woodland 
paths, pixies by the stream, and to find, in the 
very blossoming shrubs and graceful trees of 
the level river meadows a personality that is 
as nearly human as that which the Greeks gave 
their gods. Who can know the elms of the Con- 
way and Intervale meadows without loving them 
for their femininity ? Each one " walks a god- 
dess and she looks a queen." Yet each one 
flutters feminine fripperies with a dainty grace 
such as never yet stepped from motor car at 
the most fashionable hostelry between Bretton 
Woods and Poland Spring. The summer vis- 
itors who wear hobble skirts on the piazzas and 
along the lawns of the most luxurious mountain 
hotels need not think they are the first to flaunt 
this curious inflorescence of fashion before the 
stony stare of the peaks. The river-bottom elms 
have worn their peek-a-boo garments of green 
that way ever since they began to grow up in 
the meadows. Nor can the newcomers vie in 
grace, however clever their artifice, with these 



RAIN IN THE MOUNTAINS 6y 

slim mountain maids, than whom no dryads of 
any grove have ever combined caprice and dig- 
nity into more bewitching beauty. The meadow 
elms are the queens of all summer exhibitions 
of the perfect art of wearing clothes. 

The elms of the deep wood are far more 
simply dressed, losing not one whit of dignity 
by it, as he who intrudes upon them in their 
cool, shadowy bowers may know. But these 
elms of the sandy intervales where the sun would 
otherwise touch them with the full warmth of 
his admiration are dressed for the world, all in 
fluffy ruffles of green that flow yet sheathe, that 
clothe in all dignity yet are of such exquisite 
cut and proper fashion that the highest art of 
Fifth Avenue has nothing to match them. To 
look beyond these to the hillsides is to see the 
firs and spruces as prim Puritans of an elder day 
wearing the high, pointed caps of witch-women 
and conical skirts that follow the flaring lines 
of a time long gone ; and the maples and beeches 
are roundly, frankly, bourgeois, grafting the 
balloon sleeves of a quarter of a century ago 



68 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

upon the bulge of hoop-skirts such as some of 
our great-grandmothers wore in conscious pride. 
But the meadow ehiis! Sylph-Hke and teasingly 
sweet, fluify, fashionable and fascinating, yet 
robed throughout in a gentle dignity such as 
might well be the aura of purity and nobility, 
no tree in all the mountain world can quite match 
them. 

In these valleys among the high hills the man 
from the lowland regions is apt to miss and long 
for the sheen of placid waters. All descents 
are so abrupt that streams rush impetuously 
always downward toward the sea, carrying with 
them whatever may obstruct, whether flotsam 
of blown leaves or the very granite ledges them- 
selves if they impede the advance too long. 
They burst ledges, smash boulders to pebbles 
and grind pebbles to sand and then to silt and 
spread it over the meadows where the elms grow 
or hurry it on to make deltas and vex ships on 
the very sea itself. If they may not smash the 
ledges or the boulders they slowly dissolve them 
or more rapidly wear them away by constant 
scouring with the passing sand of their freshets. 



RAIN IN THE MOUNTAINS 69 

and always in the ravines they have dug sounds 
the uproar of their perpetual attrition and un- 
rest. Far away this comes intermittently in a 
soothing sibilation which seems to be saying to 
itself " Hush, hush." It is as if one heard the 
voices of little mother levels of still pools try- 
ing to quiet the fretful child-foam of the 
cascades. 

But sitting on the rock itself by the stream as 
it dashes down one gets, through this, a deep 
vibration which has almost too few beats to the 
second to be a tone, that is as much a jar as 
a sound, the deep diapason of the quivering 
granite itself. A beaten ledge responds like a 
mighty gong with a humming roar that is 
strangely disproportionate to the means em- 
ployed to produce the sound. Sometimes to 
stamp with the foot over a rounded surface of 
earth-covered granite is to produce an answer- 
ing, drumlike boom that makes one suspect that 
he stands on a thin film of rock over a cavern. 
The music of a fall has many parts. One of 
these is the sand-dance sibilation of the shuf- 
fling waters, another this boom of the rock drum 



70 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

on which the green flood beats with padded 
blows. 

As the heart of the Hstener is tuned so it an- 
swers to the mingled voices of the waters. One 
may hear in them the well-harmonized parts of 
a runic lullaby and be soothed to peace and 
belief in all things good by the music. To many 
another their perpetual turmoil and unrest find 
too loud an echo from the depths within him, 
and he longs for still lakes that look friendlily 
up to him with the blue of the sky in their 
clear eyes, fringed with the dark-pencilled lashes 
of firs beneath the brow of the hill. The valleys 
of the high white hills have so few of these 
that one may count them on the fingers of a 
hand. " Echo Lake " or " Mirror Lake " we find 
them named, and all summer long they have 
their throng of admirers, who in the lowland 
regions would pass such tiny tarns with little 
thought of their beauty. They may be so set 
that they mirror no mountain peak. Their echo 
may be no more silvery in tone or more fre- 
quently repeated than one would get if he blew a 



RAIN IN THE MOUNTAINS 71 

bugle in some dusty, forgotten city square where 
red brick blocks would toss the call from one to 
another, yet the little lakes have a charm of 
placid personality that the cataracts cannot give. 
Some day, without doubt, man will till the 
blind ravines of the upper mountain region with 
a thousand eyes of these, binding the waters 
for use and thereby adding to their beauty. 
Every narrow ravine has its stream, dashing 
uproariously downward. It needs but a barrier 
of boulders set in cement to make at once a little 
lake and a cascade. The water, set for a mo- 
ment to turn a turbine, will again dash on with 
its full gift of flashing foam and musical uproar 
for all who watch and listen, but its momentary 
restraint will have helped the men of the moun- 
tains with power and have helped the hills them- 
selves to greater permanency and added beauty. 
Man must do this if he would keep the beauty 
of the hills whence cometh his strength, or in- 
deed if he would keep the hills themselves. The 
black spruce growth that once clothed them 
from base to summit, holding the winter's snow 
and ice beneath their sheltering boughs to melt 



y2 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

slowly almost all summer long, making deep, 
cool shadows for the growth of water-holding, 
spongy mosses, he has ruthlessly cut away. For 
many years, winter after winter, out of the Glen 
Ellis River Valley, right up under the slope of 
the Presidential Range, went half a hundred 
million feet of this growth, and in all the other 
valleys where spruce remained it was the same. 
The sudden freshets are more sudden, the dis- 
integrating droughts more severe now because 
of this, and by these the very mountains them- 
selves are torn down. 

Such a little lake, built not to turn a wheel 
but to please the eye of the lovers of mountain 
beauty, has lately been made just north of Jack- 
son. There it sits in a little bowl of a hollow 
among spruce-clad hills and its waters purl 
gently over a cement dam, to splash for the 
square-tailed trout under the shadows farther 
down the ravine. Creatures that already knew 
the little stream and the marshy hollow where 
the lake had welled have taken kindly to its 
presence, but the wider ranging woodland folk 
are still surprised at finding it there and shy 



RAIN IN THE MOUNTAINS yz 

about trusting themselves on it or its borders. 
It is too young to be adopted by the water birds 
that have known the region long. The sand- 
pipers that move leisurely north up Ellis River, 
feeding and teetering as they go, do not light 
in on the borders of the new-born lake, and 
though the loons have no doubt seen it as they 
fly over, they, too, go by. I have never yet seen 
a loon plunge over the ridge to ripple its waters 
with his splash or set the goblin echoes of the 
forest laughing with his eerie cry. A mountain 
lake without one loon is lonely. In the tiny 
'' mirror lake," which is a mountain tarn that 
has been an eye to the woodland for countless 
centuries over beyond the southeast slope of 
Kearsarge, a loon family dwells, and I watch 
them from the summit, diving, feeding and mak- 
ing great sport in their world. Over on Cho- 
corua there are two such, and I fancy they are 
equally numerous on all still waters of the high 
mountain world, but they have not yet trusted 
this new-born mountain lake, nor have the 
spotted sandpipers come to nest among the ferns 
on its margin. 



74 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

But the little lake mirrors many a bird wing 
nevertheless, mainly those of the eave swallows 
that nest in a long row under the eaves of a 
Jackson barn. These know that man loves them, 
and the things that he has made, whether barn 
roofs or little lakes, are to be adopted and used 
without fear. So they swoop over the fir tops 
and skim the surface of the unruffled waters, 
dipping to touch their own reflections and twit- 
tering mightily about it as they sweep the dust 
of tiny insects out of the shimmering air. Nor 
does the lake mirror lack for the reflection of 
many even more beautiful wings. When the 
sun breaks through the passing storm a thou- 
sand gauzy, white-bodied dragon-flies magically 
appear. They cluster on sunny margins and 
dash into the air and clash wings in infinitesimal 
rustlings. Their fellows of a score of varieties 
of coloration and shape are here too, spirits of 
the air but children of its love for the waters 
and born of the lake itself. While the storm 
passes I watch their miracles of recreation. 
When the sun lights up the shallow margins 
they come swimming beneath the surface, 



RAIN IN THE MOUNTAINS 75 

strange little slender submarines with filmy 
propellers behind and round conning towers in 
front. They come to a projecting twig and 
climb up on this with hitherto unsuspected legs 
till they are many inches above the surface, 
where the sun and wind will dry them. 

How do they know the appointed time? 
Whence comes this impulse to leave the water 
which has been their home since the first faint 
beginnings of individuality were theirs? There 
is no answer to these questions in any depth to 
which scientific investigation has yet probed. 
Yet the impulse is there and they do know the 
appointed time. Moreover they know if they 
have obeyed the promptings of the impulse too 
soon. Now and then one climbs out and rests 
for a moment, then in a sudden panic lets go 
his hold on the twig and drops into the water 
again, scuttling back to the depths in haste. 
For him the hour has not yet struck. But most 
of them come out to stay. They cling motion- 
less with the sun drying their backs and filling 
them with such new life and vigor that they 
burst. The submarine is itself a shell, and as 



^e WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

it bursts out of it comes the life that animated 
it, in a new form, to dry and stretch its wings 
and presently dart into the air on them, hence- 
forth a creature of the sun. Behind each re- 
mains its water-world husk, still clinging to the 
twig to which it crawled. Sometimes I put a 
finger into the water in front of the swimming 
insect, and it as readily crawls out on that as 
on a twig, but neither of us has yet had patience 
to wait thus till the transformation is complete. 
The larger dragon-flies, with their clashing 
wings and darting flight, which is so swift some- 
times that the eye fails to record it clearly, 
seeing the insect at the beginning and again at 
the end but unable to receive an impression of 
the passage, seem well named. Here are small 
creatures, indeed, but veritable dragons never- 
theless that may well carry apprehension to the 
human watcher as well as to the tiny midges, 
which they capture in this darting flight and 
summarily devour. It may be that they will not 
sew up the mouth of the boy that swears in 
their presence, but no boy is to be blamed if he 
believes that they can. Their gorgon-like build 



RAIN IN THE MOUNTAINS ^y 

and their uncanny swiftness of motion might 
well prompt the superstitious to believe that they 
could be a terror to evil-doers. But no one could 
think the gentle demoiselles capable of wrong, 
though they are dragon-flies too and are born 
of the same waters and eat tiny insects in the 
same way. Appearances count for much with 
all of us, and the demoiselles flit so softly and 
fold their wings on alighting in such prayerful 
demureness of attitude that they seem instead 
the good folk of the fairy world that margins 
the little lake, created to bring rewards to the 
good rather than to punish evil. 

Thus by the man-made mountain tarn one may 
find the dragons and the pixies that man has 
made too, out of the debris of dreams that the 
race has accumulated since it too grew up out 
of placid waters which in ages past seem to have 
sheltered all elementary forms of life as it shel- 
ters the dragon-fly nymphs before they have 
grown up to use their wings. While the storm 
wraps the world in the illusions of romance the 
half -gods of Greek myth stalk the mist-entangled 
meadows and shout in the winding valleys, across 



78 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

the mountain streams. As the storm breaks, the 
clouds pass, and the sun floods the thin air with 
his gold, these mayhap, like the pixie dreams, 
will vanish. The half-gods go, but the gods 
arrive. The eye lifts with the clouds to wider 
and wider spaces and greater and greater 
heights, up stepping-stones of glistening cliffs, 
along rugged ranges to where the peaks sit en- 
throned in splendor, the great gods themselves. 
Vulcan looms vaguely by his black anvil, the 
distant storm swathing him in the smoke of his 
forge fire. The chariot of Apollo rides beyond, 
his arrows flashing far and fast. Cytherea 
passes with the clouds and flames them with her 
opalescent presence, and high over all, mighty 
and storm-compelling, sits Zeus himself, en- 
throned in white majesty on the carved nimbus 
of the passing rain. 




o 



VI 

CARTER NOTCH 

Its Mingling of Smiling Beauty and Weird 
Desolation 

Sometimes, even in midsummer, there comes 
a day when winter swoops down from boreal 
space and puts his crown of snow-threatening 
clouds on Mount Washington. They bind his 
summit in sullen gray wreaths, and though the 
weather may be that of July in the valleys to 
the south, one forgets the strong heat of the 
sun in looking upward to the sullen chill of this 
murky threat out of the frozen northern sky. 
Thus for a day or two, it may be, the summit 
is withdrawn into cloudy silence, which may lift 
for a moment and let a smile of sunlight glorify 
the gray crags, and flash swiftly beneath the 
portent, then it shuts down in grim obsession 
once more. 

At other times winds come, born of the brood- 
ing mass of mists, and sweep its chill down to 



8o WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

the very grasses of the valley far below, but 
this shows the end of the portent to be near. 
The morning of the next day breaks with a 
bright sun, and you go out into a crisp air that 
sends renewed vitality flashing with tingling de- 
light through every vein down to the very toe 
tips. The clouds that blotted out the summits 
with their threat of winter are gone, and the 
mountains leap at you, as you look at them, out 
of a clarity of atmosphere that one learns to 
expect where the hills rise from the verge of 
the far Western plains but which is rare in New 
England. 

The mystical haze that has for weeks softened 
all outlines and magnified all distances till ob- 
jects within them took on a vague unreality, is 
gone, and we see all things enlarged and clari- 
fied as if we looked at them from the heart of 
a crystal. And as with outlines, so with colors. 
No newly converted impressionist, however en- 
thusiastic in his conversion, could paint the grass 
quite such a green as it shows to the eye, or get 
the gold in its myriad buttercup blooms so flash- 
ing a yellow as it now has. All through the soft 




u 



CARTER NOTCH 8i 

days these have been a woven cloth of gold. 
Now the cloth is unmeshed, the very warp has 
parted, the woof separated and the particles 
stand revealed, a thousand million scattered 
nuggets instead, each individual and glowing, a 
sun of gold set in the green heaven of the 
meadow. The wild strawberries that nestled by 
thousands in the grasses so shielded that one 
must hunt carefully to see them, seeming but 
blurred shadows complementing the green, now 
flash their red to the eye of the searcher rods 
away. Here for a day is the atmosphere of 
Arizona, which there reveals deserts, drifting 
in from the north over the lush growth and 
multiple rich colors of a New England hillside 
country. 

It is a scintillant country on such a day. The 
twinkling leaves of birch and poplar flash like 
the mica in the rocks far up the hillsides, the 
surface of each dancing river vies with these, 
and through the crystal waters you look down 
upon the bottom where silvery scales of mica 
catch the light and send it back to the eye. It 
is no wonder the early explorers from Massa- 



82 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

chusetts Bay colonies came back from the white 
hills with stories of untold wealth of diamonds 
and carbuncles to be found here. You may find 
these jewels on such a day at every turn, though 
they are fairy gems only and must not be covet- 
ously snatched, lest they turn to dross in the 
hand. 

The meadows above Jackson Falls flash with 
this beauty from one hillside across to another, 
and through them winds the Wildcat River, lur- 
ing the casual passer to wade knee deep in the 
grass and clover from curve to curve, always 
fascinating with new enticement till it is not 
possible to turn back. Nor are the fairy gems 
which the long, winding valley has to show con- 
fined to the sands of the river bottom or the 
boulders scattered along its way. At times the 
air over the clover blooms is full of them, quiver- 
ing in the sun, borne on the under wings of the 
spangled fritillary butterflies that swarm here 
in early July. Above, the fritillaries have the 
orange tint of burnt gold, plentifully sprinkled 
with dots of black tourmaline, but beneath they 
have caught the silver scintillation of the mica- 



CARTER NOTCH 83 

flecked rocks and sands on which they love to 
Hght when sated with the clover honey. These 
too are gems of the mountain world which, if 
not found elsewhere, one might well come many 
miles to seek. It is easy to believe, too, that the 
spangled f ritillaries know the source of the silver 
beauty of their under wings and cunningly seek 
further nourishment for it. You find them 
hovering in golden cloud-swarms over bare spots 
of scintillant sand along the reaches of the river 
or in the paths of the roadside which rambles 
down from the hills with it, anon lighting upon 
this bare and shining earth to probe with long 
probosces and draw from the mica-flecked sand 
perhaps the very essence of its silvery glitter, 
for the renewing of their wing spots. The white 
admirals are with them, not in such swarms to 
be sure, but in considerable numbers, eager also 
for the same unknown booty. It may be that 
they too thus renew the silver of their white 
epaulets. 

I found all these and a thousand other beauties 
on my trip up the Wildcat to its source in Carter 
Notch, through this region of mica-made fairy 



84 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

gems. They lured me from curve to curve and 
from one rapid to the next beyond, always climb- 
ing by easy gradients toward the great V in 
the Carter-Moriah range, whose mysteries, to me 
unknown, were after all the chief lure. The 
crystal-clear air out of the north, which had 
swept the gloom from the high brow of Mount 
Washington, made the mountains seem very 
near and sent prickles of desire for them 
through all the blood. On such a day it is a 
boon to be allowed to climb, nor can one satiate 
his desire for the achievement of heights except 
by seeking them from dawn till dusk. Little ad- 
ventures met me momentarily on the way. Here 
in a mountain farmer's field was a great mass 
of ruddy gold, showing its orange crimson for 
rods around a little knoll. Yet this was but 
fairy gold as the gems of the Wildcat meadows 
are fairy gems, a colony of composite weeds 
which no doubt the farmer hates, but which pro- 
duce more wealth for him than he could win 
from all the rest of his farm for a decade — if 
he could but gather it. The fritillary butter- 
flies know its value and flock to it, losing their 



CARTER NOTCH 85 

own burnished coloration in it, and the wild bees 
are drawn far from the woodland to it by its 
soft perfume. To come suddenly on this was 
as good as discovering a new peak. 

To hear a tiny shriek in the wayside bushes 
and on search to rescue a half-grown field spar- 
row from the very jaws of a garter snake, send- 
ing the snake to gehenna with a stamp of a big 
foot and seeing the fledgling snuggle down again 
into the nest with the others, was as pleasant 
as finding the way to a new cascade. But after 
all, the great lure of such a crystalline day is 
toward the high peaks. The Wildcat River has 
its very beginning in the height of Carter Notch, 
and its prattle over every shallow teased me to 
follow its trail back to this high source and see 
what the spot might be. To do this step by 
step with the falling water would be a hercu- 
lean task, for the gorges down which it runs 
are choked with boulders and forest debris and 
tangled with thickets as close-set and difficult of 
passage as any tropical jungle. But there is no 
need to seek its source by that route. You may 
go within four miles of it by motor, if you will, 



86 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

up the good road from Jackson that finally 
dwindles and vanishes on the slope up toward 
Wildcat Mountain, but not before it has taken 
you through a gate and showed you the entrance 
to the A. M. C trail to the top of the Notch. 

All the way up to this point the outlook to 
the south has been growing more extensive and 
more beautiful. Black Mountain still lifts its 
broad ridge from pinnacle to pinnacle on the 
east side of the Wildcat, but Eagle Mountain, 
Thorn, Tin, and the little height between these 
last two have been dropping down the sky line 
till Kearsarge, Bartlett, Moat, and even the dis- 
tant Sandwich and Ossipee ranges far to the 
south, loom blue and beautiful above them, while 
the valley of the Wildcat unrolls its slopes, 
checkered with farm and woodland, to where the 
river vanishes from sight around the turn at 
Jackson Falls. Fifty miles of sylvan beauty lie 
before you as you look down the narrow valley, 
over the green heights that rim it to the blue 
ones far beyond, and up again to the amethystine 
sky. 

It is a wide world of sun and it is good to 



CARTER NOTCH 87 

look at it now, for the path before you plunges 
to shade immediately and is to give you little 
more than a dapple of sunlight for five miles. 
Yet it is a wide and easy way for most of the 
distance, for which the chance traveller may 
thank the lumbermen, whose road it follows, and 
the Appalachian Mountain Club. The lumber- 
men opened it. The Appalachians have kept it 
up since the tote road was abandoned. They 
even have mowed its grassy stretches each spring, 
lest some fair Appalachian pilgrim set her foot 
upon a garter snake, inadvertently and without 
malice, and henceforward abjure mountaineer- 
ing. A half-dozen brooks splash down the 
mountain-side and cross this trail, all for the 
slaking of your thirst, and if you do not find 
the garter snake to step on you may have a 
porcupine. Indeed, to judge from my own ex- 
perience, the porcupine is the more likely foot- 
stool. Just before you round the low shoulder 
of Wildcat Mountain to enter the Notch is a 
burnt region full of gaunt dead trees, and this 
neighborhood grows porcupines in quantity, also 
in bulk. One of them looms as big as a bear 



88 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

at the first glimpse of him in the trail ahead, and 
if he happens to start from ahnost beneath your 
foot as you step over a rock, giving that queer 
Httle half squeal, half grunt of his, you are 
momentarily sure that you have kicked up Ursus 
Major himself. 

But though the porcupine may squeal and 
move for a few shambling steps with some de- 
gree of quickness, he is by no means afraid of 
you. He just moves off a few feet, turns his 
back, shakes out his quills till they all point true, 
then waits for you to rush at him and bite him 
from behind — waits with a wicked grin in his 
little eye as he leers over his shoulder at you. 
Then if nothing happens he shambles awkwardly 
away into the shadows of the forest. If some- 
thing does happen it is the aggressor that 
shambles away with a mouthful of barbed, 
needle-pointed quills. But then, why should any- 
one bite a porcupine? They do not even look 
edible, and judging by the numbers of them that 
strayed casually out of the path round the shoul- 
der of Wildcat that day nothing has eaten any 
of them for a long time, else there had not 



CARTER NOTCH 89 

been so many. In this burnt district you get a 
glimpse of Carter Mountain on the other side 
of the notch you are about to enter and then 
you plunge again into deeper woods on the west 
side, under the cliffs of Wildcat, whose very 
frown is hidden from you by the high trees. 

The cool, shadowy depths here will always be 
marked in my mind as the place of great gray 
toads. I saw several of these right by the path, 
six-inch long chaps, looking very wise and old 
and having more markings of white than I ever 
before saw on a toad, besides a white streak 
all the way down the backbone. The place is 
as beautiful as these bright-eyed, curious crea- 
tures, and as uncanny. Mossy boles of great 
trees rise through its gloom and through the 
perfumed air comes the cool drip of waters. 
Moss is deep, and over it and the rough, lichen- 
clad rocks grows the Linnsea, holding up its pink 
blooms, fairy pipes for the pukwudgies to smoke. 
Here out of high cliffs have fallen great rocks 
which lie about the patch in mighty confusion. 
Here are caves, little and big, that might shelter 
all the hedgehogs roaming the fire-swept moun- 



90 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

tain-side below, and as many bears. Yet neither 
porcupines nor bears appeared, or any other Hv- 
ing things except the great white-mottled toads, 
that would not hop aside for my foot, but sat 
and gazed at me with the calm patience of wood- 
land deities. 

Then the path swung sharp down the hill 
through lesser trees that gave a glimpse of the 
high frown of Carter cliffs, swimming in the sky 
above, and then — I wonder if every pilgrim 
does not at this point laugh with pure joy and 
caper a bit on road-weary legs, for here in the 
gruesome depths of the great Notch, at the 
climax point of its wildness, is a little clear 
mountain lake where surely no lake could be, set 
in thousand-ton fragments of mighty broken 
ledges. To look north is to see a little barrier 
of wooded ridge stretching across from side to 
side of the place, and between the eye and this 
a low barrier of wood growth among great rocks, 
behind which is the air of empty space. I 
pushed through this, expecting a crater, and be- 
hold! Here is another little round lake with lily 
pads floating on its surface, and beyond this an 




*A 



u 



u 



a 
ft 
< 



CARTER NOTCH 91 

open space in the woods and the A. M. C. camp. 
The time was early afternoon of one of the 
longest days of the year, and the sun sent a 
cloudburst of gold a thousand feet down the 
perpendicular cliffs of Wildcat Mountain and 
flooded the highest source of Wildcat River with 
it. The north wind poured its wine over the 
ridge and set the surface of the little lake to 
dancing with silver lights such as had greeted 
me in the river far below, in the boulders along 
the way, and in the spangles of the thousands 
of fritillary wings that had fluttered and folded 
as I passed. Here is the crucible for the mak- 
ing of these fairy gems, and I dare say the wise 
old toads from the shadows on the side of Wild- 
cat just above are the sorcerers whence the 
tinkering trolls learned the trick of their 
manufacture. 

I had to wait but a little while, however, to 
know the difference. Stretched on the slope on 
the farther shore of the flashing lake, I watched 
the sun swing in behind the high pinnacle of 
a wildcat cliff that leaps from the water's edge 
almost a thousand feet in air, its sheer sides em- 



92 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

broidered by the green of young birch leaves. 
I had left the full tide of early summer in the 
Jackson meadows. Here it was early spring. 
There the strawberries were over ripe, here the 
blossoms were but opening their white petals, 
and the mountain moosewood and mountain ash, 
there long gone to seed, were here just in the 
height of bloom. By the lake side the Labrador 
tea offers its felt-slipper leaves for the refresh- 
ment of weary travellers who may thus drink 
from fairy shoon ; nor need one go to the trouble 
of steeping, for the round heads of delicate white 
bloom send forth a styptic, aromatic fragrance 
that is as tonic as the air on which it floats. 
A drone of wild bees was in this air, and look- 
ing up the cliff toward the sun a million wings 
of tiny, fluttering insects made a glittering mist. 
But even then the shadow of the pinnacle of 
the great cliff fell on the western margin of the 
pool and, as I lay and watched it, moved ma- 
jestically out across the waters. It wiped the 
golden glow and the fluttering sheen of insects 
from the air, the glitter from the surface of the 
lake, and spread a cool mystery of twilight over 



CARTER NOTCH 93 

all things which it touched. A chill walked the 
waters from the base of the cliff, whose rough 
rock brows frowned where the birches but an 
hour before had smiled, and all the hobgoblins 
of the wild Notch showed themselves in the ad- 
vancing shadows. Rock sphinxes and dead-tree 
dragons suddenly appeared, and as the after- 
noon advanced so did the shadows of Wildcat 
Mountain, sweeping across the narrow defile and 
bringing forth all its weird and sinister aspects. 
The way to the light of day lies down the 
stream southerly. But there is no stream. The 
waters of the upper lake flow to the other one 
beneath a great jumble of broken ledges, and 
then go on to form the stream farther down 
under a titanic rock barrier of shattered cliff and 
interspersed caverns. Gnarled and dwarfed 
spruces climb all over this great barrier, and so 
may a man if he have patience and will step 
carefully on the arctic moss which clothes the 
rocks and gives roothold to the spruces, watch- 
ful lest it slip from under him and drop him 
into the caverns of unknown depth below. It 
is a region of wild beauty of desolation even 



94 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

with the sun on it, and after the shadow of 
Wildcat has climbed it, its rough loneliness has 
something almost sinister about it. Only when 
its topmost rock is surmounted and the valley 
below shows down the Notch, still bathed in sun- 
shine and peaceful in its green beauty and its 
rim of blue mountains far beyond, may one for- 
get the weird spell which the shadows have 
cast on him in the very heart of the chasm. Here 
is the scintillant world of the Wildcat River 
valley once more, still bathed in sunshine, though 
the shadows of the range to westward creep 
rapidly toward its centre. I had seen the heart 
of its beginnings at the moment when the toil- 
ing trolls were at their work. I had seen the 
weirder spirits cast their mantle over the place, 
and far down the Notch I could hear the little 
river calling me to come down to it again as 
I scrambled off this giant's causeway to the 
friendly leading of the path and went on down 
through the region of great gray toads to the 
slope of a thousand porcupines, and on to where 
the footpath way enters the road. The smile 
of sunshine had gone from the face of the val- 



CARTER NOTCH 95 

ley and the night shadows of Wildcat and its 
spurs were drawn across it, but only for a little 
was it sombre. With the darkness came a mil- 
lion scintillations of firefly lights in all its 
grasses, and out of the clear blue of the sky 
above twinkled back the answering stars. 



VII 

UP TUCKERMAN'S RAVINE 

Day and Night Along the Short Trail to 
Mount Washington Summit 

The snow arch at the head of Tuckerman's 
Ravine holds winter in its heart all summer long. 
In the sweltering heat of the early July weather 
it is an unborn glacier, a solid mass of com- 
pacted snow and ice, two hundred feet in ver- 
tical diameter and spreading fan-fashion across 
the whole head of the ravine. Out from under 
it rumbles a stream of ice water, and it still 
makes danger for the mountain climber on the 
upper part of the path which climbs the head 
wall of the ravine and goes on, up to the summit 
of Mount Washington. All winter long the 
north wind sweeps the snow over the round ridge 
between the summit cone and Boott's Spur and 
drifts it down the perpendicular face of rock 
which stands above the beginning of the ravine. 




"The snow arch at the head of Tuckerman's Ravine holds 
winter in its heart all summer long " 



UP TUCKERMAN'S RAVINE 97 

There are summers when the heat of the sun, 
beating directly upon this glacial mass, melts 
it away. There are others when it lingers till 
the snows of autumn come to build upon it 
again. 

He who would do much mountain climbing in 
a comparatively short distance will do well to 
go up Mount Washington by the Tuckerman 
Ravine. A good motor road leads from Jackson 
to Gorham, and on, and the trail leaves this 
nine miles above Jackson. A. M. C. signs and 
the feet of thousands of mountain lovers have 
made the path's progress plain, but for a further 
sign the wilderness sends the swish of Cutler 
River, flashing over its boulders, to the ear all 
the way up to the snow arch, and it serves free 
ice water for the refreshment of travellers. 
Only in rare spots does this tiny torrent find time 
to make placid pools. All the rest of the way 
it leaps boulders, shelters trout in clear, bubbling 
depths, and makes its longest, maddest plunges 
at the cliffs down which foam the Crystal Cas- 
cades. Here, at the end of your first half-mile 
of ascent, you may lie in the shadow of maple 



98 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

and white birch on the brink of a narrow gulf, 
see the white joy of the river as it makes its 
swiftest plunge toward the sea, and listen to 
the myriad voices in which it tells the lore of 
the lonely ravine which the waters have trav- 
ersed from the very summit of the head wall. 
No water comes down the Crystal Cascade that 
is not beaten into a foam as white as the quartz 
vein in which it has its very beginnings, high 
up the cone of the summit. It is as if this 
quartz were here turned to liquid life which 
spurts in a million joyous arches from the black 
rock which it touches and leaves more nimbly 
than the feet of fleeing mountain sheep. There 
are wonderfully beautiful pink flushes in this 
white quartz and you may see them as you go 
up the path to the summit above the alpine 
gardens of the plateau. But you do not have to 
climb that far to see them. The same colors of 
dawn are in the cascade when the sun filters 
through the leaves and touches those curves of 
beauty in which the river laughs down to its 
wedding with the Ellis in the heart of the Pink- 
ham Notch. 



UP TUCKERMAN'S RAVINE 99 

In the heart of the snow arch is winter. On 
its steadily receding southern margin aU through 
July is a continual dawn of spring. As the snow 
recedes the alders emerge bare and leafless. A 
rod down stream they are tinged green with the 
beginnings of crinkly leaves and have hung out 
their long staminate tassels of bloom. Another 
rod and they are in full leafage and the stami- 
nate tassels have given place to the brown seed 
cones. These mountain alders have a singu- 
larly crimped rich green leaf, and they so love 
the snow water torrents of Tuckerman's Ravine 
that they stand in them where they plunge in 
steepest gullies down the cliffs, bearing their 
tremendous buffeting with steadfast forgiveness. 
Sometimes the freshets skin them alive and leave 
them rooted with their white bones yearning 
down stream as if to follow the water that killed 
them. The torrents hurl rocks down and crush 
them, and always the downpour of water and 
mountain-side has bent them till in the steep- 
est places they grow downward, their tips only 
struggling to bend toward the sky. Yet still in 
July they put out their bright green, corrugated 



lOO WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

leaves, array themselves in the beauty of golden 
tassels flecked with dark brown, and scatter 
pollen gold on the waters that now prattle so 
lovingly by. 

In places the river-side banks are white with 
stars of Houstonia and the lilac alpine violets 
nod from slender stems nearby. Down the high 
cliffs the mountain avens climbs and sets its 
golden blooms in the most inaccessible places, 
flowers from the low valleys and the alpine 
heights thus mingling and making the deep 
ravine sweet with fragrance and wild beauty. 
The rough cliffs loom upward to frowning 
heights on three sides, but on their dizziest gray 
pinnacles the fearless wild flowers root and gar- 
land their crags, clinging in crevices from sum- 
mit to base. With equal courage the alders have 
climbed them till they can peer at the very 
summit of the high mountain across the wind- 
swept alpine garden. 

By the middle of the afternoon the shadows 
of the heights begin to wipe the sunshine from 
the upper end of the ravine and the shade of 
the head wall marches grandly out, over the snow 




O ■" 



a. j3 



-CI .t! 



O & 



UP TUCKERMAN'S RAVINE loi 

arch and on, down stream. The long twihght 
begins then and moves out to Hermit Lake by 
six. Then the shadows are deep under the black 
growth that spires up all about the little placid 
sheet of water, though it still reflects the sap- 
phire blue of the clear sky above. The lake is, 
indeed, a hermit, dwelling always apart in its 
hollow among the spiring spruces, a tiny level 
of water, strangely beautiful for its placidity 
amid all the turmoil and grandeur about it. 
From its boggy margin the morning of the day 
that I reached it a big buck had drank and left 
his hoof prints plain in the mud among the short 
grasses. I waited long at evening for him to 
come back, but the only signs of life about the 
margins were the voices of three green frogs 
that cried " t-u-g-g-g " to one another by turns. 
One living long here might well measure the 
flight of time on a clear afternoon and evening 
by the changes of color in the lake. It is but 
a shallow pool, but you look through the mud 
of its bottom and see far below, by the inverted 
spires of the marginal trees, into infinite depths 
of a blue that is that of the sky but clarified and 



102 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

intensified by the clear waters from which it 
shines till it is to the eye as perfect and inspir- 
ing as a clear musical note that leaps out of 
silence to the longing ear. 

As the day passes this color in the lake deepens 
and changes in rhythmical cadences till twilight 
brings a deep green, through which you see the 
inverted ravine below you more clearly than 
above. The one clear note has swelled into a 
symphony of color through which floats one en- 
trancing tone, as sometimes lifts a clear soprano 
voice out of the fine harmony of the chorus, the 
pink of sunset fleece of clouds a mile above the 
head wall of the ravine. As the day fades, so 
does this high, clear tone, and the advancing 
night deepens the green to a black that is silence, 
— a silence that is velvety in body but scintil- 
lant with the glint of stars. 

Through all this symphony of changing color 
a single hermit sang till the blackness of night 
welled up to the spruce top in which he sat, and 
as if to keep him company one or two wood 
warblers piped from the very darkness beneath 



UP TUCKERMAN'S RAVINE 103 

where it seemed too dark for full songs, and 
they sang fragments only, too brief for me to 
identify the singers. From the lake itself came 
the voices of the three green frogs, speaking 
prophetically through the night with the single, 
authoritative words of true prophets. Just for 
a moment at dusk, from the icy waters of the 
stream above the lake, came a guttural chorus 
which I took to be that of tree frogs, which 
croak in the woodland pools of Massachusetts 
in March. 

In the clear waters that run from the perpetual 
winter of the snow arch I had seen two of these 
frogs, of the regulation wood frog size and shape 
but wonderfully changed in color. Instead of 
the usual brown, here were frogs that were 
cream white throughout save for a black patch 
from the muzzle across either eye extending in 
a faint line down the side nearly to the hind leg. 
They seemed like spirit frogs with all the dross 
in their epidermis washed out by the solvent 
purity of that icy snow water in which they con- 
stantly dwell. In these same pools of the icy 
stream were caddice-fly larvae which had woven 



104 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

armor for themselves with a warp of the usual 
spider-web threads and a filHng of tiny stones. 
But their stones were the scales of mica with 
which the bottoms of the pools are paved, and 
as they slowly moved about they were sheathed 
in rainbows of sky reflections in these tiny sur- 
faces. Such wonders of beauty has the heart 
of the high mountain for all that dwell in the 
depths of its ravines. 

In the blackness of full night the song of the 
falling waters is the only sound that one hears 
in the ravine. This is an ever-varying multitone 
into which he who listens may read all the day 
sounds he has ever heard. The still air takes 
up the mingled voices of tiny cataracts and 
tosses them from one wall to another, and there 
are places along the path where this sound is 
that of a big locomotive engine with steam up, 
stopping at a station, the chu-chu of the air 
brakes coming to the ear with a definiteness that 
is startling. In other spots the echo of trampers' 
voices sound till one is sure that a belated party 
is on the trail and will arrive later to share the 
hospitality of the camp. Through it all rings 



UP TUCKERMAN'S RAVINE 105 

the gentle lullaby of the wilderness, the drone 
of all the winds of a thousand years in the spruce 
tops and the crisp tinkle of clashing crystals 
when an ice storm has bowed the white birches 
till their limbs clash together in the zylophonic 
music of winter. All these and more are in the 
song which lulled me to slumber on the borders 
of Hermit Lake, — a slumber so deep and restful 
that I did not know when the porcupines came 
and ate thirteen holes in the rubber blanket in 
which I was wrapped to keep out the cold of the 
snow arch which creeps down the ravine behind 
the shadow of the head wall. Thirteen is an 
unlucky number when it represents holes in one's 
blanket, and the chill of interstellar space wells 
deep in Tuckerman's Ravine toward morning of 
a night in early July. 

Twilight begins again by three o'clock. One 
may well wonder what time the hermit thrush 
has to sleep, he sings so long into the night and 
begins again before the dawn is much more than 
a dream of good to come. As the light grows 
the castellated ridge of Boott's Spur shows fan- 



io6 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

tastic shapes against the sky, and the pinnacle 
of the Lion's Head which looms so high above 
Hermit Lake glooms sternly with grotesque 
rock faces which are carved like gargoyles along 
its ravineward margin. Beauty wreathes the 
cliffs in this wildest of spots, but goblins grow 
in the rock itself and peer from the wreaths to 
make their friendliness more complete by grue- 
some contrast. One wakes shivering and longs 
for the sun of midsummer to come out of the 
northeast over the slope of Mount Moriah and 
warm him. Far below in Pinkham Notch the 
night mists have collected in a white lake that 
heaves as if beneath its blanket slept the giant 
who carved the stairs over beyond Montalban 
Ridge. But the giant too is waiting for the 
sun, and though he stirs uneasily in his waking 
he does not toss off the blanket till it shines well 
over Carter Range and the day has fairly begun. 
The ravine gets the morning early at Hermit 
Lake. The widening slopes lie open to the light, 
but the Lion's Head jealously guards the snow 
arch and seems to withdraw its long shadow 
with reluctance. By and by the sun shines full 



UP TUCKERMAN'S RAVINE 107 

upon the great white bank, and as at the pyra- 
mid of Memnon strikes music from it with the 
increasing tinkle of falHng water. 

By this time the stirring of the giant's blanket 
has tossed off woolly fleeces from its upper side, 
and these climb toward the ravine in wraiths of 
diaphanous mist that now dance rapidly along 
the tree tops, now linger and shiver together as 
if fearful of the heights which they essay. 
These follow me as I toil laboriously up the al- 
most perpendicular slope along the snow margin 
toward the head wall, and by the time I have 
worked around the dangerous glacial mass and 
surmounted the cliffs they are massed along the 
cold slope and seem to mingle with the snow 
into an opaque, nebulous mystery. 

For a long time these do not get beyond the 
brow of the cliff. Now they bed down together, 
as dense and as full of rainbow colors under the 
sun as is mother-of-pearl, again little fluffs dare 
the climb toward the summit, fluttering with 
fear as they proceed and fainting into invisi- 
bility in the thin air that flows across the alpine 
garden. Tiny streams from the base of the high 



io8 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

cone slip down the rocks to them and whisper 
in soft voices that they need have no fear, but 
whether it is fright or the compelhng power 
of the sun that now shouts mid morning warmth 
over Carter Notch, these thin pioneers hesitate 
and vanish as the main body sweeps up from the 
Crystal Cascade and Glen Ellis Falls and fills 
all the lower ravines with that white blanket that 
began to stir at daybreak so far below. The 
giant is awake, has tossed his bed-clothes high 
in air, and is striding away along the Notch be- 
hind their shielding fluff. 

I fancy him clumping up the Gulf of Slides 
and over to the ravines of Rocky Branch on his 
way to see if those stairs he built are still in 
order in spite of the disintegrating forces so 
steadily at work pulling the mountains down. 
Listening on the top wall of Tuckerman's I can 
hear these forces at work and do not wonder 
that he is uneasy. The steady flow of white 
water in a million tiny cascades is filing the rocks 
away all day long. But the water does far more 
than this. It seeps down into the cracks in the 
great cliifs, swells there with the winter freez- 










o -^. 



UP TUCKERMAN'S RAVINE 109 

ing, and presses the walls apart. It dissolves 
and excavates beneath hanging rocks and cun- 
ningly undermines them till gravity pulls them 
from their perch and sends them down to swell 
the great masses of debris all along the bottoms 
of the ravine sides. Sitting on the head wall 
I hear one of them go every few minutes. Often 
it is only the click and patter of a pebble obey- 
ing that ever present force as it bounds from 
ledge to ledge down the wall. But sometimes 
a larger fragment leaps out at the mysterious 
command and crashes down, splintering itself or 
what it strikes on the way to the bottom. My 
own climbing feet dislodged many that have 
caught on other fragments, and in the steeper, 
more crumbled portions of the path each climber 
does his share in producing miniature slides. 
Except on rare occasions the fall of the moun- 
tains is slight, but it is continually going on 
wherever peaks rise and cliffs overhang. 

Not till the mists out of the Great Gulf over 
on the other side of the mountain had swept 
around the base of the summit cone and hung 
trailing streamers down into Tuckerman's Ra- 



no WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

vine did the masses that filled it with white 
opacity to the top of the snow arch scale the 
head wall. Then they came grandly on and met 
and mingled with their kind till Boott's Spur 
disappeared and all the long ranges of moun- 
tains to southward were wiped out by an atmos- 
phere that, with the sun lighting it, was like the 
nebulous luminosity out of which the world was 
originally made. Behind me they climbed the 
central cone, but slowly, almost, as I did. My 
trouble was the Jacob's ladder of astoundingly 
piled rocks of which the way is made. Theirs 
was a little cool wind that came down from the 
very summit and which steadily checked them, 
though they boiled and danced with bewildering 
turbulence against it. They wiped out the solid 
mountain behind me as I went till the cone and 
I seemed to be floating on a quivering cloud 
through the extreme limits of space. 

Climbing this Tuckerman's Ravine path one 
gets no hint of the buildings on the summit. 
With the clouds below me and the rocks above 
I was isolated in space on a cone of jagged 
rock whose base was continually removed from 



UP TUCKERMAN'S RAVINE in 

beneath me as I climbed. It seemed as if, when 
I did reach that high pinnacle, the last rock 
might fade from beneath my feet and leave me 
floating in the white void that came so majes- 
tically on behind me. We reached the top to- 
gether, but the crisis was not so lonely as I had 
imagined. Instead, I found myself walled in 
by opaque mists indeed, but still with much solid 
rock beneath my feet and a friendly little vil- 
lage, a railroad track and station, a stage office 
and stables, and an inn at hand, all with familiar 
human greetings for the weary traveller. You 
may come to the summit by many paths, by train, 
carriage or motor, but no trail has more of 
beauty, or indeed more of weirdness if the fluff 
of the giant's blanket follows you to the sum- 
mit, than the three miles and a half of steady 
climbing by way of Tuckerman's Ravine. 



VIII 

ON MOUNT WASHINGTON 

Sunny Days and Clear Nights on the Highest 
Summit 

The dweller on the top of Mount Washington 
may have all kinds of weather in the twenty- 
four hours of a July day, or he may have a 
tremendous amount, all of one kind, extending 
through many days. It all depends on what, 
winds Father ^olus keeps chained, perhaps in 
the deep caverns of the Great Gulf, or which 
ones he lets loose to rattle the chains of the 
Tip Top House. My four days there were such 
as the fates in kindly mood sometimes deal out 
to fortunate mortals. The land below was in 
a swoon of awful heat. People died like flies 
in cities not far to the southward. The summit 
had a temperature of June, and the wind that 
drifted in from Canada made the nights cool 
enough for blankets; all but one. The night 
before the Fourth we perspired, even in this 




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ON MOUNT WASHINGTON 113 

wind of Hudson Bay, and the habitues of the 
hilltop were properly indignant. They had snow- 
balled there for a brief hour on the July Fourth 
of the year before and these sudden changes 
were disquieting. 

Of these four gems of days the first was a 
pearl, two were amethystine, and the last was 
of lapis lazuli. The morning of the pearl broke 
after light rains in the valley below, the air so 
clear that the city of Portland lifted its spires 
on the eastern horizon just before sunrise and 
the blue water of Casco Bay flashed beyond it. 
Yet the nearer valleys were shrouded in the 
white mists that were mother-of-pearl, a matrix 
that gradually rose and blotted out the green 
and gray of granite hilltops below till the sum- 
mit was a great ship, rock-laden, ploughing 
through a white tumultuous sea whose billows 
were fluffy clouds like those on which Jupiter 
of old sat and dispensed judgment on mankind. 
I know of nothing so much like this sea of white 
cloud surface seen from above as is the sea of 
Arctic ice under a summer sun, its white, sun- 
softened expanse crushed into flocculent pres- 



114 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

sure ridges of frozen tumult stretching as far 
as the eye can reach. Yet this is different in 
its strange beauty, for the Arctic ice changes its 
form only slowly, while this fleecy sea, seemingly 
so stable to the fleeting glance, changes shape 
before the next look can be given. No breath 
of wind may fan your brow on the summit, but 
the clouds below you tread a stately minuet, ad- 
vancing, retreating, meeting and dividing, now 
a white Arctic sea, again a swiftly dignified 
dance by ghostly castles in Spain. 

Often the near mists close in upon the sum- 
mit and make all opaque, and the gray, shadowy 
hand of the cloud lies against your cheek and 
leaves a smear of cool moisture when it is with- 
drawn. On that morning when the summit and 
the day were bosomed together in a white pearl 
I saw the wayward moods of an imperceptible 
wind ordering this dance of the clouds. It 
passed down from the peak by the path that 
leads over the range to Crawford Notch, wav- 
ing one line of mists eastward from the ridge 
until Boott's Spur and Tuckerman's Ravine 
stood clearly revealed, while on the west an 



ON MOUNT WASHINGTON 115 

obedient white wall stood, wavering indeed, but 
holding its ground from the margin of the path 
high into the sky toward the zenith. For nearly 
half an hour any alpinist climbing over the head 
wall of Tuckerman's in sunshine would have 
seen his way clearly to this Crawford path, and, 
going westward, have stepped into the white 
mystery of the mists on the farther verge. 

Again the imperceptible winds beckoned and 
the clouds whirled up from Pinkham Notch and 
blotted out the spur and the ravine, pirouetting 
up to meet their partners while the latter re- 
treated, fluttering lace skirts behind, the high- 
walled chasm of clear space between them pass- 
ing over the ridge and swinging north until met 
by an eruption of white dancers out of the Great 
Gulf and across the railroad track. Then all 
whirled together up the rough rock tangle of 
the central cone and blotted out the world in a 
pearly opacity. 

The clouds that morning were born in the 
lowlands and ascended to the summit from all 
sides, out of Huntington and Tuckerman Ra- 



ii6 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

vines, out of Oakes Gulf and Great Gulf and 
up from Fabyan's by way of the Base Station 
and the Mount Washington Railroad, enfolding 
the summit only after they had shown the mar- 
vels of their upper levels all about the founda- 
tions of the central cone. Then, after the white 
opalescence of the conquest of the peak the 
whirling dervishes above, for an hour or two, 
now occluded, again revealed, what was below. 
For half an hour they danced along the north- 
ern peaks, now hiding, now disclosing portions 
of them, but always during that time showing 
the peak of Adams, a clearly defined purple- 
black pyramid, framed in their fleece. After 
that for a long time they lifted bodily for ten- 
minute spaces, revealing another body of mists 
below, their upper surface far enough down so 
that the castellated ridge of Boott's Spur, Mount 
Monroe, Mount Clay and Nelson Crag stood 
out above them. 

Here were clouds above clouds, the upper 
levels whirling in wild dances, fluttering together 
and again parting to let the sun in on the sum- 
mit and on the levels below whence rose fleecy 



ON MOUNT WASHINGTON 117 

cloud rocks of white, tinged often with the rose 
of sunHght, mountain ranges of semi-opaque 
mists that changed without seeming to move 
and showed oftentimes a curious semblance in 
white vapor to the land formation as it is re- 
vealed below on a clear day. Out of these lower 
clouds came sometimes sudden jets of vapor, as 
if the winds below found fumaroles whence 
they sent quick geysers of mists, vanishing 
fountains of a magic garden of the gods. Old 
Merlin, long banished from Arthur's Court in 
the high Welsh hills, may well have found a 
retreat in this new world Caerleon, nor did ever 
knight of the Round Table see more potent 
display of his powers of illusion and evasion 
than were here shown for any man who had 
climbed the high peak on that day of pearl 
cloud magic. 

Afterward came two days of fervent sun on 
clear peaks that stand all about the horizon from 
Washington summit, half islanded in an ame- 
thystine heat haze, as beautiful, seen from the 
wind-swept pinnacle, as if old Merlin after a 



ii8 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

day of tricks with pearls had ground all the 
gems of his magic storehouse to blue dust that 
filled the valleys of all the mountain world. On 
those days few men climbed the peak, but all 
the butterflies of the meadows and valleys far 
below danced up and held revels in the scent 
of the alpine plants, then in the full joy of their 
July blooming. The more distant valleys were 
deeply hazed in this amethystine blue, but the 
nearer peaks and plateaus stood so clear above 
them that it seemed as if one might leap to the 
lakes of the clouds or step across the great 
gulf to Jefferson in one giant's stride. I have 
heard a man on the rim of the Grand Caiion 
in Arizona declaring that he could throw a stone 
across its thirteen miles. So on those days in 
the high air miles seemed but yards, and only 
in the actual test of travel did one realize how 
far the feet fall behind the eye in the passage 
of distances. 

At nightfall one realized how that heat haze 
not only possessed the valleys but the air high 
above them, for the sun, descending, grew red 
and dim and finally was swallowed up in the 




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ON MOUNT WASHINGTON 119 

mists of his own creating long before he had 
reached the actual horizon's rim. Under his 
passing one lake after another to westward 
flashed his mirrored light back in a dazzling 
gleam of silver, then faded again to become a 
part of the blue dust of the distance. By their 
flashes they could be counted, and it was as if 
each signalled good night to the summit as the 
day went on. Eastward the purple shadow of 
the apex moved out across the Alpine garden, 
joined that of the head wall of Huntington Ra- 
vine, and, flanked by those of the Lion's Head 
and Nelson Crag, went on toward the horizon. 
Clearly defined on the light-blue haze where the 
sun's rays still touched, this deep pyramid of 
color moved majestically out of the Notch and 
up the slope of Wildcat Mountain, leapt Carter 
Notch and from the high dome of the farther 
summit put the Wild River valley in shadow as it 
went on, up Baldface and on again across the 
nearer Maine ranges, till it set its blunt point 
on the heat-haze clouds along the far eastern 
horizon. Nothing could be more expressive of 
the majesty of the mountain than to thus see 



120 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

its great shadow move over scores of miles of 
earth and on and up into the very heavens. 

It was as if God withdrew the mountain for 
the night into the sky, leaving the watcher on 
that great ledge-laden ship which is the very 
summit, plunging on over dark billows with the 
winds of space singing wild songs in the rig- 
ging. Beneath is the blue-black sea of tumultu- 
ous mountain waves that ride out from beneath 
the prow and on into the weltering spindrift 
haze of distance where sea and sky are one. In 
the full night the winds increase and find a 
harp-string or a throat in every projection of 
the pinnacle ledges whence to voice their lone 
chanteys of illimitable space. It is the same 
world-old song that finds responsive echoes in 
man's very being but for which he can never 
find words, the chantey of the night winds that 
every sailor has heard from the fore-top as the 
ship plunges on in the darkness when only the 
dim stars mark the compass points and the very 
ship itself is merged far below in the murk of 
chaos returned. What the night may be during 






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ON MOUNT WASHINGTON 121 

a storm on this main-top of the great mountain 
ship only those who have there endured it may 
tell; my nights there were like the days, fairy 
gifts out of a Pandora's box that often holds 
far other things beneath its lid. 

Dawn on the mornings of those days was 
born out of the sky about the summit as if the 
fading stars left some of their shine behind 
them, a soft, unworldly light that touched the 
pinnacles first and anon lighted the mountain 
waves that slid out from under the prow of the 
ship and rode on into the flushing east. As the 
heat haze at night had absorbed the red sun in 
the west, so now it let it gently grow into being 
again from the east. In its crescent light he 
who watched to westward could see the moun- 
tain come down again out of the sky into which 
it had been withdrawn. Out of a broad, indis- 
tinct shadow that overlaid the world it grew 
an outline that descended and increased in defi- 
niteness till the apex was in a moment plainly 
marked on the massed vapors that obscured the 
horizon line. Down these it marched grandly, 
touching indistinct ranges far to westward, more 



122 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

clearly defined on the Cherry Mountains and 
the southerly ridges of the Dartmouth range, 
and becoming the very mountain itself as its 
point touched the valley whence flows Jefferson 
Brook and the slender thread of the railway 
climbs daringly toward the summit. 

V Below in a thousand sheltered valleys the 
hermit thrushes sang greetings to the day. Far 
up a thousand slopes the white-throated spar- 
rows joined with their thin, sweet whistle, and 
higher yet the juncos warbled cheerily, but no 
voice of bird reaches the high summit. The 
only song there is that of the wind chanting still 
the thrumming runes of ancient times, sung 
first when rocks emerged out of chaos and 
touched with rough fingers the harp strings of 
the air. To such music the light of day de- 
scends from above, and the shadows of night 
withdraw and hide in the caves and under the 
black growth in the bottoms of ravines and 
gulfs. Rarely does one notice this music in the 
full day. Then the rough cone even is a part 
of man's world, built on a sure foundation of 
the familiar, friendly earth. It is only the dark- 



ON MOUNT WASHINGTON 123 

ness of night that whirls it off into the void of 
space and sets the eerie runes in vibration. Few 
nights of the year are so calm there that you 
do not hear them, and even in their gentlest 
moods they come from the voices of winds lost 
in the void, little winds, perhaps, rushing shiver- 
ingly along to find their way home and whis- 
tling sorrowfully to themselves to keep their 
courage up. 

Man comes to the summit at all hours and by 
many paths. Often in that darkest time which 
precedes the dawn one may see firefly lights ap- 
proaching from the northeast, bobbing along in 
curious zigzags. These will-o'-the-wisps are pe- 
destrians, climbing by the carriage road to greet 
the first dawn on the summit and watch the sun 
rise, carrying lanterns meanwhile lest they lose 
the broad, well-kept road and fall from the Cape 
Horn bend into the solemn black silence of the 
Great Gulf. The voices of these are an alarm 
clock to such as sleep on the summit, calling 
them out betimes to view the wonders they seek. 
By day men and women appear on foot from 



124 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

the most unexpected places. The Crawford and 
Gulf Side trails, Tuckerman's and the carriage 
road bring them up by accepted paths, but you 
may see them also clambering over the head wall 
of Huntington's or the Gulf, precipitous spots 
that the novice would think unsurmountable. 

.These are the '' trampers," as the habitues of 
the mountain summit call them. But the car- 
riage road brings many who ride luxuriously 
up for four hours behind two, four or six horses, 
or flash up in less than an hour to the honk of 
automobile horns and the steady chug of gaso- 
lene engines. The old-time picturesque burros 
that patiently bore their riders up the nine miles 
of the Crawford trail have gone, probably never 
to return, and the horseback parties once so 
common are now rare. But by far the greater 
numbers climb the mountain by steam. From 
the northerly slope of Monroe, over beyond the 
Lakes of the Clouds, I watched the trains come, 
clanking caterpillars that inch-worm along the 
trestles of the cogged railroad, clinking like 
beetles and sputtering smoke and steam as only 
goblin caterpillars might, finally becoming mo- 



ON MOUNT WASHINGTON 125 

tionless chrysalids on the very summit. From 
these burst forth butterfly crowds that put to 
shame with their raiment the gauzy-winged 
beauties that flutter up the ravines to enjoy the 
sweets of the Alpine Garden. Then for a brief 
two hours on any bright day the bleak summit 
becomes a picnic ground, bright with gay crowds 
that flutter from one rock pinnacle to another 
and swirl into the ancient Tip Top house to buy 
souvenirs and dinner, restless as are any lepi- 
doptera and as little mindful of the sanctity of 
this highest altar of the Appalachian gods. Soon 
these have reassembled once more in their chrys- 
alids that presently retrovert to the caterpillar 
stage and crawl clanking and hissing down the 
mountain, inching along the trestles and van- 
ishing anon into the very granite whence you 
hear them clanking and sputtering on. Amid 
all the weird play of nature in lonely places the 
summit has no stranger spectacle than this. 

The day of lapis lazuli began with a break 
in the intense heat, a day on which cumulus 
clouds rolled up thousands of feet above the 
summit in the thin air and cast their shadows 



J26 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

before them, to race across the soft amethyst 
of the miles below and deepen it with their rich 
blue out of which golden sun-glints flashed 
still, racing shifting breaks in the cloud masses 
above. The wind increased in velocity toward 
mid-afternoon and cumulus massed in nimbus 
on the far horizon to the northwest out of which 
the flick of red swords of lightning and the 
battle roar of thunder sounded nearer and 
nearer. Mightily the black majesty of the storm 
moved up to us, wiping out earth and sky in 
its progress, the rolling edges of its topmost 
clouds still golden with the color of the sun that 
sank behind them. Here was a glory such as 
day nor night, sunrise nor sunset, had been able 
to show me. 

The pagan gods of the days long gone seemed 
to come forth out of the summits far to the 
northwest and do battle, but half-concealed by 
their clouds. Swords flashed high and javelins 
flew and the clash of shields and the rumble 
of chariot wheels came to the ear in ever in- 
creasing volume as the tide of battle swept on 
and over the summit. A moment and we should 



ON MOUNT WASHINGTON 127 

see the very cohorts of Mars himself in all their 
shining fury, but father ^olus let loose all the 
winds at once from his caverns, Jupiter Pluvius 
opened wide the conduits of the clouds and the 
world, even the very summit thereof, was 
drowned in the gray tumult of the rain. 



IX 

MOUNT WASHINGTON BUTTERFLIES, 

Filmy Beauties to he Found in Fair Weather on 
the Very Summit 

The height of the butterfly season comes to 
the rich meadows about the base of Mount Wash- 
ington in mid-July. The white clover sends its 
fragrance from the roadside and the red clover 
from the deep grass for them, and all the meadow 
and woodland flowers of midsummer rush into 
bloom for their enjoyment, while those of an 
earlier season seem to linger and strive not to 
be outdone. The cool winds from the high sum- 
mits of the Presidential Range help them in this, 
and even in the summer drought the snow-water 
from the cliffs and the night fogs of the ravines 
keep them moist and fresh. No wonder that 
butterflies swarm in these meadows and even 
climb toward the summits along the flowery paths 
laid out for them up the beds of dwindling moun- 
tain torrents and under the cool shadows of 




u 



MT. WASHINGTON BUTTERFLIES 129 

forests impenetrable to the sun. Butterflies come 
to know woodland paths as well as man does and 
delight to follow them. 

Of a July day the butterflies and I jour- 
neyed together up the flower-margined carriage 
road that leads to the summit of Mount Wash- 
ington. They may have been surprised at the 
pervasiveness of my presence. I am sure I was 
at theirs, which lasted as long as the marginal 
beds of wild flowers did. 

To climb this smooth road leisurely, on foot, 
is always to marvel at the engineering skill which 
found so steadily easy a grade up such an ac- 
clivity and so cunningly constructed it that it 
has been possible to keep it in good condition 
all these years — it was finished in 1869 — in 
spite of summer cloudbursts and the gruelling 
torrents of melting snow in early spring. One 
is well past the first mile post before he realizes 
that he is going up much of a hill. The rise 
is that of an easy country road and might be 
anywhere in the northern half of New England 
from all outside appearances. 

The striped moosewood and the mountain 



130 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

moosewood growing by the roadside under white 
and yellow birch and rock maple suggest the lati- 
tude. The white admiral butterflies emphasize 
the suggestion. Rarely have I found these plants 
or this insect south of the northern boundary of 
Massachusetts. The white admirals flip their 
blue-black wings with the broad white epaulettes 
up and down the road in numbers. Butterflies 
of the shady spots, they find this highway where 
the trees arch in and often meet above peculiarly 
to their taste. Yet the meadow-loving fritillaries 
outnumber the admirals ten to one. Not even 
among the richly scented clover of the flats be- 
low, not even in the full roadside sun on the milk- 
weed blooms which all butterflies so love, are 
they so plentiful. I suspect them of having a 
strain of adventurous blood in their veins, such 
as gets into us all when among the mountains 
and sets us to climbing them, and later obser- 
vations bear out the suspicion. It was a day 
to lure butterflies to climb heights, still, steeped 
in fervid sun heat, and redolent of the per- 
fect bloom of a hundred varieties of flowering 
plants. 



MT. WASHINGTON BUTTERFLIES 131 

At first I thought these all specimens of the 
great spangled fritillary, Argynnis cybele, but 
they gave me such friendly opportunities for 
close examination that I soon knew better. The 
greater number of these mountain climbing 
butterflies were a rather smallei' variety with a 
distinct black border along the wings, Argynnis 
atlantis, the mountain fritillary. They swarmed 
along the narrow shady road as plentiful as the 
blossoms of field daisies and blue brunella. With 
playful necromancy they made the daisies change 
kaleidoscopically from gold and white to gold and 
black, or they folded their wings and set the 
flower stalks scintillant with silver moon span- 
gles. So with the blue brunella blooms. They 
flashed from close spikes of modest blue flecks 
to great four-petalled flowers of gold and silver 
and black, a blossom that would make the for- 
tune of any gardener that could grow it, and 
presto! the miracle of bloom rose lightly into 
the air on fluttering wings and the stalk held 
only the shy blue of the brunella after all. Such 
is the magic of the first mile of the ascent, which 
might be any easy rise under the deciduous shade 



132 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

of most any little New Hampshire hill, so far 
as appearances go. 

During the second mile spruces slip casually 
into the roadside. They do it so unassumingly 
that you hardly know when, they and the firs. 
But the swarms of butterflies go on up the grade 
and through the dense foliage you still glimpse 
no mountain tops. With them shines occa- 
sionally the pale yellow of Colias philodice, and 
little orange skippers skip madly from bloom to 
bloom of the wayside flowers that still fill the 
margins from woods to wheel tracks. Clear- 
wing moths buzz and poise like miniature hum- 
ming birds, and with them in the deeper shadow 
flits a small white moth so delicately transparent 
and so ethereally pure in color that when he lights 
on a leaf the green of it shines through his wings. 

These first two miles of the carriage road 
are amid scenes of such sylvan innocence that 
a partridge with her half-grown brood hardly 
feared me as their path crossed mine, and they 
flew only when I approached very near them. 
Cotton-tailed rabbits hopped leisurely across in 
front of me, in no wise excited by my approach. 



MT. WASHINGTON BUTTERFLIES 133 

and though the chipmunks whistled shrilly and 
dived into their holes before I touched them, they 
waited almost long enough for me to do it. The 
roadside flowers climbed bravely up the second 
mile among the wayside grasses, white clover, 
blue-eyed grass and golden ragwort, with the 
daisies, these not so plentiful as below, and the 
gentle brunella, and out of the woods came as 
if to meet and fraternize with them the rose- 
veined wood sorrel, its pure white petals seeming 
even more diaphanous because of the rose-vein- 
ing. The heart-shaped, trifoliate leaves of this 
lovely little plant which climbs the great moun- 
tain on all sides are not those of the veritable 
shamrock, perhaps, but they are enough like them 
to prove to a willing mind that St. Patrick must 
surely have climbed Mount Washington in his 
day, and that this gentle insignia of his clan 
remained behind to prove it. It is a flower of 
shaded mossy banks in deep evergreen woods, 
where its tender white flowers, with their beau- 
tifully rose-shaded, translucent petals, delight the 
eye along the lower and middle reaches of all 
paths that lead to the summit. 



134 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

Toward the end of the second mile one reaHzes 
that he is chmbing high. Through the trees to 
westward flit ghmpses of the deep valley of the 
Peabody River, when he has risen, and beyond 
it the misty blue wall of the Carter Range, rising 
ever higher behind him as he goes up. The 
fritillaries come on, but the admirals drop behind 
to be seen no more, their places taken by an 
occasional anglewing, Grapta interrogationis or 
Grapta comma. As the road rises the wayside 
flowers too fall behind, leaving lonely places, 
though well up to the Halfway House, nearly 
four miles up, white and pink yarrow is to be 
found, flanked by bunchberry blooms and the 
lovely greenish yellow of the Clintonia. This has 
half-ripened berries in the lowlands at the base, 
but toward the summit of the mountain it blooms 
till well into the middle of July, perhaps later. 
The butterflies fall behind as the roadside flowers 
do, yet now and then a mountain fritillary goes 
by and almost at the Halfway House I saw the 
most superb Compton tortoise, Vanessa j-album, 
that I have met anywhere. Below the Halfway 
House young spruces have crowded into the road- 



MT. WASHINGTON BUTTERFLIES 135 

side to the very wheel tracks, and the last of the 
lowland blooms has vanished. On the day that 
I came looking for them the lowland butterflies 
had vanished too, and the road seemed bare and 
desolate for two or three miles, indeed until the 
alpine plants of the high plateau began to appear, 
and with them the Arctic butterfly that makes this 
summit home, the curious little Oeneis semidea. 

I had thought to find this, " the White Moun- 
tain butterfly," the only variety of the plateau 
and the summit cone, but in this the day and 
the place had more than one surprise in store 
for me. There are many days in summer when 
even the hardiest, strongest-flying lowland but- 
terfly would not be able to scale the summit 
because of wind and cold, but this day had only 
a gentle air drifting in from the north, and the 
heat, which was a killing one below, was there 
tempered to that of a fine June day. The sudden 
bloom of the alpine plants had passed its 
meridian, but many were still in good flower. 
All along on the head wall of the Tuckerman 
Ravine and out upon the Alpine Garden were 
the pink, laurel-like cups of the Lapland azalea. 



136 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

There was the Phyllodoce coerulea with its urn- 
shaped corolla turning blue as it withers, the 
three-toothed cinquefoil, Potentilla tridentata 
which looks to the careless glance like a little 
running blackberry vine with its star of white 
bloom, and everywhere low clumps of the lovely 
little mountain sandwort, Arenaria groenlandica, 
the only petal-bearing plant that dares the very 
summit, where its white, cup-shaped blooms make 
the bleak rocks clad. 



t>' 



On the Alpine Garden and at the ravine heads 
are lower level flowers which come up and min- 
gle with these. The buttercup-like blossoms of 
the mountain avens flash their rich yellow. The 
Labrador tea puts out its white umbels and sends 
spicy fragrance down the wind. The houstonia 
grows bravely its little white, four-pointed stars 
with their yellowish centre, and cornel and even 
Trientalis, the American star-flower, grow from 
the tundra moss and make a brave show in that 
bleak spot. Boldest of all is the great, rank- 
growing Indian poke, with its erect stem of big 
green leaves and its topping spike of greenish 



MT. WASHINGTON BUTTERFLIES 137 

bloom. High up to the angles of the rock jumble 
of the cone, wherever the water comes down into 
the Alpine Garden, this climbs with a bold as- 
surance that no other lowland plant equals. It 
is plentiful in the neighborhood of the Lakes of 
the Clouds and high on the head wall of the 
Tuckerman Ravine it sprouts under the receding 
snow, blanched like celery. 

All these and more were in bloom on the 
plateau that supports the high cone of Washing- 
ton summit on that day, and up to them had come 
the lowland butterflies. Most plentiful were the 
mountain fritillaries, but often a great spangled 
fritillary spread his wider wing above the head 
wall of Huntington or Tuckerman and soared 
along the levels. With these was an occasional 
angle-wing, Grapta interrogationis and Grapta- 
progne, feeding in the larval stage on the leaves 
of the prickly wild gooseberry which is common 
well up to the base of the summit cone. Strange 
to relate, the beautiful, hardy, and common 
mourning cloak was not to be seen on the days 
in which I hunted butterflies about the summit, 



138 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

but his near relative, the Compton tortoise, 
Vanessa j-album, was there, and the smaller but 
lovely little Vanessa milberti, with his wings so 
beautifully gold-banded, I saw frequently. Mil- 
bertis flew up out of the Great Gulf toward the 
summit, and one afternoon I found one of them 
carefully following the Crawford trail down, 
winding its every turn a foot above the surface 
as if he knew that it was made to show the 
way. To the very summit, circling the Tip Top 
House, came big, red-winged, black-veined mon- 
archs, and all the varieties I had seen in the 
Alpine Garden came up there too, most numerous 
of all being the mountain fritillaries. I take it 
that no one of these lowland butterflies is bred 
at these high levels, but that all wander up when 
the sun is bright and the wind still enough to 
permit the excursion. 

Most interesting of all to the leipdopterist is 
the one Arctic butterfly of our New England 
fauna, Oeneis semidea, " The White Mountain 
Butterfly," which might be perhaps better called 
in common parlance " The Mount Washington 
Butterfly," as it is commonly believed to be re- 



MT. WASHINGTON BUTTERFLIES 139 

stricted in its habitat, so far as New England is 
concerned, to the high summit cone of Mount 
Washington. Holland so states in his excellent 
butterfly book. As a matter of fact the insect 
is plentiful over a rather wider range. I found 
it along the Crawford trail out to the Lakes of 
the Clouds and Mount Monroe, as well as along 
the lawns and Alpine Garden and down the car- 
riage road far below the summit cone. It is 
also found at similar altitudes on Jefferson, 
Adams and Madison, its habitat being rather the 
high peaks of the Presidential Range than Mount 
Washington alone. 

But semidea persistently haunts the great gray 
rock pile which is the summit cone. Wherever 
you climb, there it flutters from underfoot like 
a two-inch fleck of gray-brown lichen that has 
suddenly become a spirit. Alighting, it turns 
into the lichen again. In rough weather the 
other butterflies go down hill into the shelter of 
the ravines, but this one has learned to fight 
gales and midsummer snow storms and hold 
patriotically to its native country. Even in still 
weather when disturbed it skims the surface of 



I40 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

the rock in flight, seeming to half crawl, half 
fly, lest a gale catch it and whirl it beyond its 
beloved peak. Its refuge is the little caverns 
among and beneath the angled boulders, and 
when close pressed by a would-be captor it flies 
or climbs down into these as a chipmunk would, 
and remains there till the danger has passed. It 
seems to be born of the rocks and to flee to its 
mother as children do when afraid of anything. 
It is our hardiest mountaineer. Neither beast 
nor bird dares the winter on this high summit. 
Yet here, winter and summer, is the home of this 
boreal insect which in the egg or the chrysalid 
withstands cold that often goes to fifty below 
Fahrenheit, and is backed by gales that blow 
a hundred miles an hour. No wonder this little 
but mighty butterfly takes the colors of the rocks 
that are its refuge. 

It is the only easily noticed form of animated 
wild life that one is sure to find on the very 
summit, even in summer. Hedgehogs sometimes 
come to the door of the Tip Top House in sum- 
mer weather and have to be shooed away, and 
gray squirrels have been seen there; but these, 



MT. WASHINGTON BUTTERFLIES 141 

like the tourists, are casual wanderers from the 
warmer regions below. I believe the only bird 
that makes its summer home on the cone is the 
junco, though I heard song-sparrows and white- 
throats sing down on the levels of the plateau, 
at the Alpine Garden and about the Lakes of the 
Clouds. The juncos breed about these next high- 
est levels in considerable numbers, and one pair 
at least bred this summer high up on the summit 
cone, about a third of the way down from the top 
toward the Alpine Garden. Like the Arctic but- 
terflies, the refuge of this pair was the interstices 
of the rocks themselves, the nest being actually 
a hole in the ground, beneath an overhanging 
jut of ledge where the moss from below crept 
perpendicularly up to it, but left a gap two inches 
wide into which the mother bird could squeeze. 
It was almost as much of a hole in the ground 
as that in which a bank swallow nests, absolutely 
concealed, and protected from wind or down- 
rush of torrential rain. 

Rare butterflies are not the only insects which 
tempt the entomologist to the very summit of 



142 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

Mount Washington. On my butterfly day there 
I found two members of the Cambridge Ento- 
mological Society dancing eagerly about the 
trestle at the terminus of the Mount Washington 
Railway, collecting beetles, of which they had 
hundreds stowed away in their cyanide jars. 
I '11 confess that all beetles look alike to me, but 
these grave and learned gentlemen were ready 
to dance with joy at their success of the after- 
noon before at the Lakes of the Clouds, where 
each had captured one Elaphrus olivaceus. The 
name sounds like something gigantic; as a mat- 
ter of fact, olivaceus is a tiny, dark, oval-shaped 
beetle, on which these enthusiasts saw beautiful 
striae and olive-yellow stripes. Having the eye 
of faith I saw them too, but only with that eye. 
Together we went hunting the Alpine Garden 
for Elaphrus laevigatus, another infinitesimal 
prodigy of great rarity and scientific interest, 
but the omens were bad and Isevigatus escaped. 
Such are some of the magnets with which this 
mighty mountain top draws men and women 
from all over the world, to spend perhaps 
a day, perhaps a summer, among its clouds, 



MT. WASHINGTON BUTTERFLIES 143 

its scintillant sunshine and its ozone-bearing 
breezes. 

Storm winds drive most of us below. When 
they blow, all the beautiful lowland butterflies set 
their wings and volplane down to the shelter of 
the valleys behind the jutting crags and the head 
walls. The chill of descending night as well 
drives these light-winged creatures off the hurri- 
cane deck of this great rock ship of the high 
clouds. But the thousands of hardy Oeneis 
semidea simply fold their lichen gray wings and 
creep into miniature caverns of the jumbled 
granite, waiting, warm and secure, for the light 
of the next sunny day. 



X 

MOUNTAIN PASTURES 

Their Changing Beauty from Lozv Slopes to 
Presidential Plateaus 

On the mountain farms the cultivated fields 
hold such levels as the farmer is able to find. 
Often on the roughest mountain side he has 
found them, treads on the stairways of the hills 
whose risers may be perpendicular cliffs or slide- 
threatening declivities. These last are for wood- 
land in the farm scheme, if tremendously rough, 
or if they have roothold for grass and foothold 
for cattle they are pastures. Thus it is the 
pastures rather than the cultivated lands that 
aspire, and from their heights one looks down 
upon the farm-house and the farmer and his 
men at work in the hay fields. The stocky, 
square-headed, white-faced cattle may well feel 
themselves superior to these beings far below 
who groom and feed them, and from their wind- 
swept ridges I dare say they have the Emer- 




i J^ 



MOUNTAIN PASTURES 145 

sonian thought, even if they have never learned 

the couplet: 

"Little recks yon lowland clown 
Of me on the hilltop looking down." 

These mountain cattle are of many breeds, 
according to the fancy or the fortune of their 
owner. Probably many of them are mongrels 
v^^hose ancestors it would be hard to determine, 
yet there seems to be a strong resemblance in 
some to those cattle one sees on Scottish hills 
and in the highlands of the English border, and 
one wonders if here are not lineal descendants 
of the stock which came in with the early Eng- 
lish settlers. At least the white-faced ones have 
been settled on the mountain pastures long 
enough to become part and parcel of them. Ex- 
cept when in motion they so fit their rocky sur- 
roundings as to be with dif^culty picked out 
from them by the eye. One might say the pas- 
ture holds so many hundred rocks and cattle, but 
which is which it takes a nice discernment to 
decide. Especially is this true when the herd 
stands motionless and regards the wandering 
stranger. Then the red bodies are the very color 



146 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

shadows of the green pasture shrubs and the 
white faces patches of weather-worn granite. 
Sometimes it is disconcerting to tramp up to such 
a rock in such a shadow and have it suddenly 
spring to its feet with an indignant " ba-a " and 
flee to the forest with much clangor of a musi- 
cal bell. 

Most of the mountain cattle wear this bell, 
which is but a hollow, truncated, four-sided 
pyramid with a clapper hung within. It does 
not tintinnabulate, but " tonks " with a tone that 
is low, but carries far and seems always a part 
of the woodland whence it so often sounds, — 
woodland in which pasture and cattle so contin- 
ually merge. In its mellow tones the clock of 
the pasture strikes, marking the lazy hours for 
the loving listener. In the time when the slen- 
der thread of the old moon disputes with the new 
dawn the honor of lighting the high eastern 
ridges, I hear it chorusing in mellow merriment 
as the herd winds up the lane from the big old 
barn. It briskly rings the changes of the fore- 
noon as the herd crops eagerly among the rocks, 
the slowing of its tempo marking the appeasing 



MOUNTAIN PASTURES 147 

of hunger. Through the long, torrid hours of 
mid-day it sleeps in the deep shadow of the 
wood, toning only occasionally as the drowsy 
bearer moves. Then with the coming of the 
afternoon hunger I hear it again, moving down 
the mountain with the day, to meet the twilight 
and the farmer at the pasture bars. 

As these mountain cattle are curiously differ- 
ent in aspect and carriage from those of our 
lowland pastures in eastern Massachusetts, so 
the pastures themselves differ widely in more 
than location and level. Here in part is the old 
world of bird and beast, herb, shrub and tree, 
yet many an old friend is missing and many a 
new one is to be made. It is difficult to believe 
that a pasture can be fascinating and lovable 
without either red cedars or barberry bushes, 
yet here are neither, and though the slim young 
spruces stand as prim and erect as the red cedars 
of a hundred and fifty miles farther south, they 
do not quite take their places, nor do they have 
the vivid personality of those trees. It is the 
same with the barberry. There is an individ- 



148 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

uality, an aura of personality about the shrub 
that forbids any other to take its place or in- 
deed to in any way resemble it. The mountain 
pastures are the worse for that. 

For my part I miss the clethra more even 
than these. July is the time for those misty white 
racemes to be coming into bloom and sending 
down the wind that spicy, delectable fragrance 
that seems to tempt him who breathes it to ad- 
venture forth in search of all woodland romance. 
But the clethra is a lover of the sea rather than 
the mountains and it has never voyaged far up 
stream. The waters of the mountain brooks 
have lost their clearness long before they greet 
the clethra on their banks. The striped moose- 
wood and the mountain moosewood, both pas- 
ture-bordering shrubs of the high pastures, are 
beautiful in their way, but they cannot make 
up for this sweet-scented, brook-loving beauty 
of the lowlands. 

There are two pasture people, however, who 
love the high slopes of the White Mountain 
pastures as well as they do the sandy borders 
of the Massachusetts salt marshes. These are 



MOUNTAIN PASTURES 149 

the spirseas, lati folia and tomentosa. The latter, 
the good old steeple bush or hardhack, moves 
into some rocky, open slopes till it seems as if 
there was hardly room for any other shrub or 
scarcely for grass to grow, and makes the whole 
hillside rosy with its pink spires. It always 
seems to me as if the hardhack should be 
hardier than its less sturdy-looking, more dainty 
sister, the Spiraea latifolia or meadow-sweet. In 
most pastures of the foothills, so to speak, I find 
them together, but as one goes on up the slopes 
of the high ranges the hardhack vanishes from 
the wayside leaving the meadow-sweet to climb 
Mount Washington itself and show the delicate 
pink of its bloom over the head wall of the 
Tuckerman Ravine and about the Lakes of the 
Clouds. Nor has it altogether escaped the pas- 
ture there. The white-faced cattle remain be- 
hind with the hardhack, but the deer come over 
the col from Oakes Gulf and browse on its leaves 
and those of the Labrador tea and drink from 
the clear waters of the high lakes. These herds 
of the highest pastures bear no bell and fit into 
the color scheme of the landscape better even 



150 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

than the white-faced cattle, and it is no wonder 
that they escape observation. Yet I find their 
hoof marks at almost every drinking place of 
these highest mountain moors. 

In these last days of July the most conspicu- 
ous bird of the pastures is the indigo bunting. 
I say this advisedly and in the presence of gold- 
finches, myrtle and magnolia warblers, purple 
finches and various sparrows, including the 
white-throat, also some other birds who breed 
and sing there. Yet of all these the indigo bunt- 
ing seems by numbers and pervasiveness to be 
most in the public eye; I being the public. 
Early in the morning he sings. In the full 
warmth of noontide he sings, and I hear him 
when the sun is low behind the Presidential 
Range and the clouds are putting their gray 
nightcap on the summit of Washington. Always 
it is the same song, which slight variations only 
tend to emphasize without obscuring. "Dear, 
dear," he says, " Who-is-it, who-is-it, who-is-it? 
dear, dear, dear." And sometimes he adds a 
little whimsical, stuttering, " What-do-you-know- 
about-that?" He sits as he sings on the pen- 



MOUNTAIN PASTURES 151 

ultimate twig of some pasture shrub or tree, and 
as tlie sun shines on his indigo bhie suit it 
flashes Httle coppery reflections from it that 
might well make one think him the product of 
some skilled jeweller's art rather than born of 
an egg in the bushes. 

With the self-consciousness of the average 
summer visitor, I at first thought that this song 
of his referred to me. I fancied that he was 
calling to his little brown wife at the nest in 
the nearby bushes, exclaiming about this stranger 
who was tramping the pastures and asking 
her about him. If you wish to know about 
new people in town ask your wife. Any 
happily married indigo bunting will give you 
that advice. But I know his theme better now. 
I have seen the wife slip slyly out of the dense 
green of the thicket, and have most impolitely 
invaded it, there to find the compact grass nest 
full of a new-born bunting family. I know now 
that the father bunting sits in the tree tip and 
exclaims all day long over the arrival of these. 
Seeing their huddled, naked forms, their as- 
tounding mouths and unopened eyes, I do not 



152 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

wonder that he exclaims in perplexity and in- 
deed some dismay over the new arrivals. 

"Dear, dear/' he says, " Who-is-it, who-is-it? 
What-do-you-know-about-that ? " He will never 
get over his astonishment at such tiny gorgons 
coming from those pale, pretty eggs that were 
there but a few days ago. Nor do I blame him 
one bit. It does not seem possible that these 
miracles of ugliness can ever grow up to be such 
sleek, beautiful birds as this father of theirs that 
sits on the tree-top and all day long fills the 
pasture with echoes of his song of wonder over 
them. No. His song had no reference to me, 
but was strictly concerned with his own affairs. 
Like the other native-born mountaineers, he does 
not take the summer visitors any too seriously. 
It is interesting to go up the mountains from one 
pasture, scramble to another and see what low- 
land folk fall behind and how the habits of those 
that keep up the climb change as they progress 
into the higher altitudes. The woodchuck is not 
missing here, but he is not the same. He is 
the northern woodchuck, very like his Massa- 
chusetts cousin in habits but grayer, leaner and 



MOUNTAIN PASTURES 153 

rangier. At this time of year a Massachusetts 
woodchuck is so fat that if you meet him he 
fairly rolls to his hole. The northern woodchuck 
gets into his with a scrambling bound that shows 
much less accumulation of adipose tissue. I 
fancy this leanness and greater alertness is due 
to the greater numbers and greater alertness of 
his woodland enemies. The pastures are full 
of foxes, and when they get hungry they go 
down and dig out a woodchuck for dinner. But 
even the northern woodchuck fails the pastures 
in their higher portions. 

One by one the lowland flowers fall back and 
the lowland trees and shrubs, also, until high 
on the Presidential Range the pastures them- 
selves, in the common use of the word, have 
failed as well. Yet I like to think the true use 
of the word includes that debateable land at the 
tree limit as pasture land. In the economy of 
a farm it would surely be of use for nothing else, 
and it would make excellent pasturage in sum- 
mer, were there farms near enough to use it. 
It always seems homelike, this region of grass 



154 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

and browse, coming to it as one does from the 
dark depths of fir woods and dwarfed deciduous 
trees. The hemlocks, beeches, yellow birches 
and maples have stayed behind in the region of 
cow pastures. Here where sometimes the deer 
come and where mountain sheep ought to find 
pasturage, only the hardiest of pasture people 
have dared to take their stand. The firs and 
spruces have come up, growing stockier and 
more gnome-like at every hundred-foot rise, 
until above the head walls of the ravines they 
shrink to low-growing shrubs not knee high, ex- 
cept where they have cunningly taken advantage 
of some hollow. Even there they rise no higher 
than the shelter that fends them from the north 
wind. Above that they are trimmed down, often 
into grotesque shapes like those that old-time 
gardeners afifected, shearing evergreens into 
strange caricatures of beasts or men. Often on 
these Alpine pastures you find a boulder behind 
which on the south a fir has taken refuge. Close 
up to the rock it mats, drifting away from it, 
southerly, in much the same lines that a snowdrift 
would assume in the same position. There is 



MOUNTAIN PASTURES 155 

in this nothing of the spiring shape of the same 
variety of spruce or fir in the valley pastures 
far below. Yet the botanists accept this as an 
individual distortion due to environment and do 
not class these firs or spruces of the mountain 
pastures as a variety different from those that 
grow below. 

They think otherwise of other trees. 

The white birches come up in location and 
come down in size on these mountain pastures 
very much as do the spruces and firs. We have 
the big canoe birch of the lower slopes, often 
a splendid tree that matches any in the forest 
in height. On higher ranges it shrinks and even 
undergoes certain structural changes that have 
given excuse for the naming of new varieties. 
Hence, beginning with Betula papyrifera in the 
valleys we have a shrinkage to cordifolia, minor, 
and glandulosa with its sub-variety rotundifolia, 
this last a veritable creeping birch which sticks 
its branches but a little above the tundra moss in 
places where the spruce and fir trees are not 
much different in character and the willow be- 
comes most truly an underground shrub with no 



156 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

bit of twig showing above the surface and only 
the Httle round leaves cropping out, making a 
growth that is more like that of a moss than 
that of a tree. To such straits do wind and 
cold reduce the trees that defy them. 

Yet in spite of the botanical classification 
which sets up these dwarfed trees as different 
varieties from those of the lower slopes, one 
cannot help wondering if the differentiation is 
justified. Suppose the seeds of a big paper 
birch from the lower valley were planted among 
the creeping willows of the Alpine Garden on 
Mount Washington. Would they not grow a 
dwarfed and semi-creeping Betula glandulosa or 
rotundifolia? Would not the seeds of glandu- 
losa, if blown down into the lower valley and 
growing in the soil among the paper birches pro- 
duce Betula papyrifera? It always seems to me 
that there is less difference between the creep- 
ing birches of the high plateaus of the Presi- 
dential Range and the paper birches of the lower 
slopes than there is between the grotesquely 
dwarfed firs and spruces of the Alpine Garden, 



MOUNTAIN PASTURES 157 

and the big ones that grow in Pinkham Notch 
and in the rich bottom lands of the lower part 
of the Great Gulf. 

The alders of these highest pastures are very- 
dwarf, and because of the puckered leaf mar- 
gins have received the specific name of crispa, 
being familiarly known as the mountain alder 
or green alder. Yet we have in lower pastures 
the downy green alder, Alnus mollis, so much 
like its higher-growing relative that even the 
authorities say it may be but a variation. Here 
again one wonders if the difference is not that 
of climate on the individual rather than one of 
species, and if the seeds of Alnus mollis from 
the banks of the Ellis River if planted along the 
head wall of the Tuckerman Ravine would not 
grow up to be Alnus crispa. It seems as if there 
was a very good opportunity for experimenta- 
tion along some line between the Silver Cascades 
and the rough rocks at the base of the summit 
cone of Washington. Down in the valleys the 
j uncos build their nests in low shrubbery or at 
least on the top of the ground. Up on the side 
of the summit juncos build actually in holes in 



158 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

the ground, and lay their eggs ahiiost a month 
later than those below. Here is a variation in 
habit, yet in each case the bird is Junco hiemalis ; 
perhaps when the scientists really get around to 
it we shall have the cone builders classed as 
variety hole-iferus. 

But however we may differ as to the naming 
of the plants and birds that frequent them, all 
who have climbed that far confess to the beauty 
of these highest pastures of the New England 
world. To wander in them of a sunny summer 
day for even a short time is to begin to be fond 
of them, an affection which increases with each 
subsequent visit. There soon gets to be a homey 
feeling about them that lasts at least while the 
sunshine endures. With the passing of the sun 
comes a difference. The chill of the high spaces 
of the air comes down then and the winds com- 
plain about the cliffs below and above and 
prophecy disaster to him who remains too long. 
It is well then to scramble downward and leave 
the highest pasture lands to the deer, if they 
choose to climb out of the sheltering black 
growth below, or to such spirits of lonely space 



MOUNTAIN PASTURES 159 

as may come at nightfall. Far below are the 
man-made pastures that are friendly even at 
nightfall, and it is good to seek these. The tonk 
of the cow-bells will lead you in lengthening 
shadows out of the afterglow on the heights 
down into the trodden paths and beyond to the 
pasture bars. 



XI 

THE NORTHERN PEAKS 

Some Fascinations of the Gulf side Trail in 
Stormy Weather 

The summit of Mount Washington sits on so 
higli buttresses of the lesser spurs and cols of 
the Presidential Range that it is not always easy 
to recognize its true height. From the south, 
east and west it is a mountain sitting upon 
mountains, gaining in grandeur indeed thereby 
but losing in individuality. To realize the moun- 
tain itself I like to look at it from the summit 
of Madison, the northernmost of the northern 
peaks. There you see the long, majestic upward 
sweep of the Chandler Ridge, swelling to the 
rock-burst of the Nelson Crag, and beyond that, 
higher yet and farther withdrawn, the very 
summit, immeasurably distant and lofty, across 
the mighty depths of the Great Gulf. Here is 
the real mountain and the whole of it laid out 
for the eye from the beginnings in the low val- 




u 



THE NORTHERN PEAKS i6i 

ley of the Peabody River to the corrugated pin- 
nacle which is the crest. It takes the gulf to 
make us realize the mountain, and great as the 
gulf is it is forgotten in the mighty creature that 
rears its head into the clouds beyond it. From 
Madison the mountain has more than individ- 
uality. It has personality. It is as if some great 
god of Chaos had crushed an image of immens- 
ity out of new-formed stone. To look long at 
this from the northernmost peak is to realize its 
personality more and more. If some day, sit- 
ting on the pinnacled jumble of broken rock 
which is Madison summit, I see the mighty one 
shiver and wake and hear him speak, I shall be 
terrified, without doubt, but not surprised. 

When August comes to the Northern Peaks 
I like to come too, by way of the Gulfside Trail 
which leaves the carriage road a little below the 
summit of Washington and skirts the head wall 
of the Great Gulf. Here in early August, just 
off the carriage road, I am sure to find the moun- 
tain harebells nodding friendly to me in the 
breeze, their wonderful violet-blue corollas fleck- 
ing the bare slopes with a beauty that is as dear 



i62 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

as it is unassuming. It is easy to stride by these 
and not see them, so much they seem but shadow 
flecks of the sky above, yet once seen no one 
can go by without stopping for at least a time 
to worship their brave loveHness. Flowers of 
intense individuality are the harebells, with each 
group having, oftentimes, characteristics pecu- 
liarly its own. It seems always to me that these 
of the high summits of the Presidential Range 
are of a deeper, richer blue than any others. 
This may be because of the atmosphere in which 
I see them. They and the mountain goldenrod, 
the Spiraea lati folia and the little dwarf rattle- 
snake-root with its nodding, yellowish, compo- 
site flowers, have come in to take the places of 
the spring blooms that opened in these high gar- 
dens with July. Down at the sea level the sea- 
sons have three months each. Up here July is 
spring, August is summer, and the autumn has 
flown from the hilltops before the last days of 
September have passed. 

Of the spring flowers that have lingered be- 
yond the limits of their season are the beautiful 



THE NORTHERN PEAKS 163 

little mountain sandwort, whose clumps still 
bloom white in favored spots, though most of 
the others hold seed pods only, and the three- 
toothed cinquefoil with its blossoms so like those 
of a small running blackberry that it is easy to 
mistake it for a stray from the pastures far 
below. The mountain avens, too, has what seems 
a belated crop of its yellow, buttercup-like blooms 
in a few places, though over the most of its area 
brown seed heads only nod on the tall blossom 
stalks. Such are the flowers of the Presidential 
Range high plateaus in earliest August, and 
though the harebells are to me the most beauti- 
ful and most striking, individually, the moun- 
tain goldenrod outdoes all others in profusion 
of color, its golden sprays swarming up from 
the Great Gulf to the trail about its head and 
garlanding the rocks toward the summit with 
feathery bloom that lures the lowland butterflies 
to climb trails of their own as far as it goes 
and to soar over the very summit in search of 
more of it. As a background for these flowers 
grows the mountain spear-grass, which is so 
much like the June grass of our lowland fields. 



i64 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

its feathery blooms making a soft purple mist 
in many places. On the very summit of Wash- 
ington this is abundant, disputing the scant soil 
with the sandwort, the two the most Alpine of 
all New England plants. Rapidly indeed do all 
these plant dwellers in Alpine heights hasten 
through their love and labor of the summer sea- 
son, for with October comes the winter which 
will put them all to sleep until the end of the 
following June. 

The human sojourner in this region needs as 
well to hasten wisely with an eye on the weather. 
My early August trip began at the Halfway 
House and strolled on up the mountain in very 
pleasant morning sunshine. On the col between 
Washington and Clay the sun had hazed and the 
cool sea odor of the southeast wind bade me cut 
short my worship of harebells and mountain 
goldenrod. Yet so clear was the air that every 
detail of the bottom of the Gulf stood out to the 
eye, and Spaulding Lake, a quarter mile below 
me and a mile distant, looked so near that it 
seemed as if with a jump and perhaps two flops 
of even clumsy wings I might light in it. Where 



THE NORTHERN PEAKS 165 

the path swings round the east side of Jefferson 
I began to get gHmpses of the mountains far 
to southeastward, and as I stood above Ding- 
maul Rock and looked straight down Jefferson 
Ravine I could see the haze behind the south- 
east wind shutting off these as well as the sun. 
The great hills no longer sat solidly on the earth 
beneath. Instead a soft blue dust of turc|uoise 
gems flowed up from the valleys and lifted them 
from their foundations till they floated gently 
zenithward through an increasing sea of this 
same semi-opaque blue. Always the distant 
mountains are ethereal. Tramp them as much 
as you may, get the scars of their granite ledges 
on yourself, as you surely will if you climb them, 
get to know their every crag and ravine if you 
can; and when it is all done and you look at 
the mountain only a few miles away, it takes 
itself gently from the realm of facts and becomes 
to your eye but the filmy substance of a dream, 
a picture painted on the sky and thence hung 
on the walls of memory forever. So these moun- 
tains to the southeast of Jefferson — Header, 
Baldface and Eastman first, Imp and Moriah, 



i66 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

the Carters and even Wildcat — lifted and 
swam in this blue sea of dreams that the south- 
east wind brought up with it, quivered and van- 
ished into forgetfulness, and beyond where their 
summits had disappeared I saw the long blue- 
gray levels of stratus clouds standing out against 
the lesser gray of the storm blink and rising 
slowly and evenly toward the zenith. 

Slowly, with majestic sureness a storm was 
marching up from the south. No unconsidered 
assault of the heights was this, no raid by the 
white cavalry of thunderstorm, but a forward 
march of a great army of investment, bent on 
complete conquest of the range. So slow was 
its coming and so sure its promise that no 
mountain climber need rush to safety. Each 
could proceed with the same dignity as the 
storm, having ample time to beat a safe retreat. 
By noon no animal life was visible on the high 
levels. The juncos have nests innumerable in 
tiny, sheltered caverns under overhanging rocks. 
The mother birds were snuggled deep in these 
on the brown-spotted eggs. Butterflies and 



THE NORTHERN PEAKS 167 

bumblebees had been busy all the morning in 
the goldenrocl, and a host of other insects, cole- 
optera, diptera, hymenoptera, honey seekers and 
pollen eaters. Now all had vanished save here 
and there a bumblebee that still clung, drunk 
with nectar, in the yellow tangle of bloom. The 
wind that had been so gentle blew cold on these 
and swished eerily through the sedges on the 
borders of the little pool over on the side of 
Sam Adams, known as Storm Lake. Very dif- 
ferent was this swish of the wind in the sedges 
from its soft song in the mists of the mountain 
spear-grass. Very different was the feel of it 
as it blew out of the smooth gray arch of sky 
where had been those level lines of stratus clouds. 
It had blown these to the zenith and over, and 
the following mists had shut off the Carter 
Range entirely, and even as I watched from the 
Peabody spring on the southwest slope of Sam 
Adams they shut off the farther ridge of the 
Great Gulf and came over the close tangled tops 
of the dwarf spruces with the swish of rain. 
Even then as I tramped along the northerly 
slopes of Adams and John Quincy Adams I 



i68 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

could see the fields of Randolph laid out in 
checker-board pattern and the lower slopes of 
the Crescent Range farther to the north, but 
as I came down the final pitch to the stone hut 
on Madison a gust growled ominously over the 
Parapet and a rush of rain shut the visible world 
within a narrow circle of which I was glad to 
make the cosy shelter of the hut the centre. 

The Madison hut is built of stone, cemented 
together, and is tucked so well into the hillside 
that one may step from the rocks in the rear 
to the roof. Certainly its walls are storm proof, 
but for thirty hours the wind did its best to 
tear the roof ofif it while the rain filled every 
gully with a rushing torrent, and the caretaker 
and I did our best to make merry within the 
safe shelter of the walls. The clouds that had 
been so high came down with the rain and made 
the world an opaque mass of solid white. It 
was not so much like a mist as like a cheese 
through which the wind in some miraculous 
fashion blew at a tremendous rate. From mid- 
afternoon of one day until mid-forenoon of the 
next there was no change in this white opacity 




o 



o 



■^ "S 
s ^ 
p^ ^ 



^•3 



U 



THE NORTHERN PEAKS 169 

which blocked the very door and hid objects 
completely though only a few feet away, and 
through it the wind roared in varying cadences 
and the drumming rain fell steadily. Then came 
occasional tiny rifts in this white cheese in which 
the world was smothered. It lifted a little from 
the mountain side beneath and left fluffy 
streamers of mist trailing down. By noon it 
had shown the summit of John Ouincy once, 
then shut down as if it were a lid operated by 
a stiff spring. Late in the afternoon, thirty 
hours after the murk had immured us in the 
hut, the wind had lulled, swung to the west, and 
was shredding the clouds to tatters, through 
which I climbed to the peak of Madison. 

■Again the great gods of chaos were crushing 
an image of immensity out of new formed stone. 
Out of the void of cloud I saw it come, piece 
by piece, the artificers adding to and withdraw- 
ing from their structure as the result pleased 
or displeased them. Once they swept the moun- 
tain away entirely leaving only the formless 
gray of chaos, then as if with a sudden access 



170 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

of skill and inspiration swept the whole grandly 
into being, and the low sun shot his rays through 
the debris of their previous failures and gilded 
the final structure. Through the long miles 
below me came the voice of the Great Gulf. 
Down its sheer declivities ten thousand streams 
were splashing to reach the swollen flood in the 
channels of the west branch of the Peabody. 
Each lisped its consonant or its vowel, and as they 
met and mingled in syllables and sped on the 
river took them and built them into words and 
phrases, an oration whose sonorous uproar came 
from the deep diaphragm of the mighty space 
out of which, for all I know, the mountains 
themselves were born. Down its distant, nar- 
row ravine I could see the Chandler River leap 
from its source high on the Nelson Crag, to its 
junction with the west branch, a continuous line 
of white cataract, roaring full from brink to 
brink. Few little rivers of any mountains fall 
so swiftly through so deep and straight a ravine 
and few indeed have a mountain top three miles 
away that gives an unobstructed view of their 
flood fury from source to mouth. 



THE NORTHERN PEAKS 171 

A little aftermath of the storm, blown back 
on the ever freshening north wind, sent me down 
the cone again to further refuge in the hut, and 
it was not until the next morning that I could 
retrace my steps over the gulf side trail to Wash- 
ington. Again I started with a clear sky, but 
by the time I had made the miles to the east 
side of Jefferson the high summits were altars 
whereon the little gods of storms were at work. 
They caught the saturated air that rose from 
all ravines, laid it across the upper slopes and, 
hammering it with the brisk north wind, beat 
white puffs of mist out of it with every stroke. 
These streamed from the peaks and were caught 
and tangled on them and in one another till all 
distances vanished and I walked in a narrowing 
world where mist creatures played and danced 
lightly to the tinkle of water that still fell from 
all heights. More and more little clouds the 
little gods hammered out on the slopes and ever 
fresher blew the north wind that swirled them 
together after it had beaten them out. The van- 
ishing distance took with it the peaks above and 
the Gulf below, and the world that had been so 



172 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

great became very small indeed, a half circle of 
rocks but a few rods in circumference bisected 
by a trail and the whole packed in cotton wool. 

In the lower parts of the trail between Jeffer- 
son and Clay this packing was thinnest. Prob- 
ably at yet lower levels it was clear and these 
were clouds that floated above. But this thin- 
ness was not sufficient to give the traveller any 
landmark. His only hold on the earth was that 
tiny circle of rock that ever changed yet was 
ever the same as he went on, and the trail itself. 
As this rose along the west slope of Clay and 
swung along the levels toward the head wall 
of the Gulf the packing became more dense, and 
I walked in Chaos itself, thankful that the trail 
is here so well marked that one does not need 
to see from monument to monument, but may 
follow the way foot by foot without fear of 
wandering. A little lift came in this density just 
at the head wall of the Gulf. To the south just 
for a moment loomed ghostly blobs of deeper 
gray that I knew were the water tanks of the 
railroad, not a stone's toss away. To the north 
was the ravine. On this spot I had stood two 



THE NORTHERN PEAKS 173 

mornings before and marvelled at the seeming 
nearness of the little lake a mile away. The 
rim of the head wall showed ghostly gray, but 
there was no Gulf. All the world, above, below 
and beyond, was but a mass of cotton wool so 
solidly packed that it seemed as if I might walk 
out onto that space where the Gulf should be 
and not fall through it. 

Further on the trail was harder to find and 
the little diminution in the density ceased. The 
little gods of storms were doing well at their 
practice. No drop of rain fell, but where the 
north wind blew this white mass of mist against 
me it condensed within the pores of all garments 
and filled them with moisture. The last land- 
marks of the trail vanished and the white clouds 
blew in and tangled my feet like a flapping 
garment as I stepped upon the carriage road 
and turned mechanically to the right, hardly 
able to distinguish by sight the roadside from 
the rocks that wall it in. Even the great barns 
where they stable the stage horses were invisible 
as I walked between them, but I found the plank 



174 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

staircase which leads up to the stage office and 
found that and a good fire and a jolly crowd 
inside. My trip over the northern peaks had 
been one of such varied adventure that it was 
to be preferred to one made under fair skies and 
on a windless day. Yet this tramp in the clouds 
was to be had that day on the high summits 
alone. At the base of these and even up to 
the head walls of the ravines during a good part 
of the time the air had been clear. It was just 
the little weather gods making medicine with 
the saturated air from the ravines and the cold 
steel hammer of the north wind. 



XII 

THE LAKES OF THE CLOUDS 

The Alpine Beauty of These Highest New 
England Lakes 

At nightfall from the summit of Mount Wash- 
ington the Lakes of the Clouds look like two 
close-set, glassy eyes in the face of a giant, a 
face that stares up at the sky far below and whose 
hooked nose is the summit of Mount Monroe. 
As the light passes, the glassy stare fades from 
these and they lie fathomless black orbs that gaze 
skyward a little while, then close, and the giant, 
whose outstretched body is the southern half of 
the Presidential Range, sleeps. In the full sun- 
shine of a pleasant forenoon one knows them for 
tiny, shallow lakes, and so near do they look that 
it seems almost as if a good ball player might 
cast a stone into them from the rim of the sum- 
mit just behind the Tip Top House. As a mat- 
ter of fact, they are a little over two miles away 
over declivities and ridges that lie above the tree 



176 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

line. For the most part the trail to these lakes, 
whether one comes from Mount Washington or 
along the Crawford bridle path, seems bare and 
desolate to the overlooking glance. But when one 
gets down to it he finds it full of beauty and 
interest. The southern part of the Presidential 
Range, between Mount Washington and Mount 
Clinton, is a mighty ridge, out of which topple 
the crests of Monroe, Franklin and Pleasant, 
a giant still by day, but now a giant wave 
petrified. 

Coming up the land from the south I had 
thought that the lifting of Mount Washington 
through the plastic earth had caused the waves 
of land to radiate from it in all directions, but 
to stand on the highest summit is to see that 
this is not so. The force that made the moun- 
tains to the south and the mountains to the 
north is the same, and the Presidential Range 
is a result, also, and not a cause. It is but the 
seventh wave of those which ride in from the 
northwest, and the force which made them all 
came over the land from countless leagues be- 
yond. The Presidential Range lifts out of the 



THE LAKES OF THE CLOUDS 177 

hollow of the wave, which is the Ammonoosuc 
Valley, in a long clean sweep southeastward, 
exactly as a mighty wave does at sea. It pin- 
nacles into the various peaks and it drops sud- 
denly, almost sheer in places, into the next hol- 
low beyond. This hollow beyond the northern 
peaks is the Great Gulf, beyond the southern 
peaks is Oakes Gulf, and beyond Mount Wash- 
ington itself begins with Huntington and Tucker- 
man ravines. Something drove mighty waves 
through the land from the west, sent them pin- 
nacling five and six thousand feet above the sea 
level, and froze them there. The main wave is 
the solid rock mass thirteen miles long and in 
the neighborhood of five thousand feet in height 
above the sea level. The crests are the summit 
cones, jumbled piles of great mica-schist rocks, 
varying in size from a cook-stove to a city block, 
all seeming to have been tossed together in a dis- 
orderly heap and to have settled down into such 
regularity as gravity at the moment allowed. 
The central cores of these may be soHd. Cer- 
tainly the outer part is but a jumble of loose 
rocks that sometimes topple and grind down over 



178 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

one another at a touch and that give air and 
water access to unknown depths. 

I Hence on the peak of Washington, for in- 
stance, or Adams, or Jefferson, one may see the 
somewhat astonishing spectacle during a heavy 
downpour of rain of a great rock pinnacle ab- 
sorbing the water as fast as it falls. One would 
expect miniature cataracts and a rush of a thou- 
sand streams down such a summit at such a time. 
Yet the downpour gets hardly beyond the spatter 
of the drops. The loose rocks absorb and hide 
it. Hence after every rainfall welling springs 
on the summits, and farther down the gurgle 
of waters running in unseen crevices one never 
knows how far below the surface. Hence, also, 
lakes of the clouds. After every rain there are 
well-filled springs on the very top of Washington, 
and it is only after many days of dry weather 
that these begin to dwindle. There are chunks 
of ledge up there so hollowed out toward the sky 
that they hold the rain by the first intention, so 
to speak, and every cloud that touches them oozes 
from its fold more water for their sustenance. 



THE LAKES OF THE CLOUDS 179 

Often for weeks these pools reflect the stars by 
night and evaporate under the shine of the sun 
by day. In one of them in late June of this 
year I found a pair of water striders skipping 
merrily about on the calm surface. Two weeks 
of drought dried the pool up completely, and I 
thought these daring adventurers on the ultimate 
heights dead, and indeed wondered much how 
they came there at all. But later a good rain 
filled the pool again and my two water striders 
appeared on its surface once more, merry as 
grigs. I am divided in my mind as to what they 
did meanwhile. Perhaps they simply survived 
the drought by main strength ; perhaps they fol- 
lowed the dew down into cracks between the 
rocks and there abided in at least some mois- 
ture till the rain came. But I am more of the 
opinion that they simply skipped down the cav- 
erns toward the interior and there found an 
underground pool for a refuge until they could 
return to the sunlight. I can think of no other 
excuse for water striders on the summit of 
Mount Washington. 

This pool, of course, like a half score others 



i8o WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

that one can find on the very top of the summit 
cone after rain, was a mere puddle. But the 
Lakes of the Clouds are substantial bodies of 
water the summer through, and in the winter 
substantial bodies of ice, for they freeze to the 
bottom as soon as winter sets in. Water striders 
they have and larvse of caddis flies and water 
beetles of many varieties, but never a fish swims 
in them, and I doubt if any other form of aquatic 
animal life ever wanders to their shores. Clear 
as crystal, shallow, ever renewed, they are but 
mirrors in which by day the peaks can see if 
their clouds are on straight and through which 
by night fond stars may look into the eyes of 
other stars near by without being noticed by 
envious third parties. Their source is the clouds, 
yet their waters are if possible clearer and even 
more sparkling than new fallen rain. Even the 
air above the highest peaks has its dust and soot 
which the rain washes out of it as it comes 
down. In the spring the snow at the head of the 
Tuckerman Ravine was dazzling in its pure white- 
ness. Now the dwindling arch is flecked with 
black; dust blown from the peaks above, soot 



THE LAKES OF THE CLOUDS i8i 

washed to its surface from the sky by the rain, 
and without doubt also the cinders of burned- 
out stars that perpetually sift down to earth out 
of the void of space. 

All this the rain brings out of the sky when 
it comes in deluge from the clouds to the peaks,, 
but nothing of it does it take into the Lakes of 
the Clouds. The crushed rock through which it 
must filter on its way down the ledges takes out 
all impurities, and the mosses of the lower slopes 
aid the process. But they do more than that. 
By mysterious methods of their own the moun- 
tains aerate this rain water in its passage till it 
finally reaches the lakes, as it reaches all moun- 
tain springs, filled with a prismatic brilliancy 
that is all its own. Whether we assume these 
lakes to be eyeglasses of the slumbering giant 
which is the Range, or mirrors for the peaks and 
the stars, they are crystalline lenses of no ordi- 
nary brilliancy and power of refraction. 

High as these tiny mirrors of the sky are, by 
actual measurement 5053 feet above the sea level, 
the highest lakes east of the Rocky Mountains, 



i82 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

the tree line creeps up to them, and firs, dwarfed 
but beautiful in their courage, set spires along 
portions of their borders, dark, straight lashes 
for clear blue eyes. In other spots along their 
margin the ground is bluish early in the season 
with the leaves of the dwarf bilberry, pink- 
sprayed with their tiny, cylindrical petals of de- 
ciduous bloom, and, now that August is here, 
blue in very truth with the berries themselves. 
These are not large, but they are firm-fleshed 
and sweet as any lowland blueberry, and whether 
the flavor they have is inherent in themselves or 
draws its subtlety from the surroundings I am 
never sure, but as I sit among them and eat I 
know that it is worth the climb to their Alpine 
altitudes. 

In the first part of the Alpine springtime, 
which comes to the Lakes of the Clouds with 
the early days of July, the country round about 
them was a veritable flower garden. The water 
in the lakes was ice water then, though the ice 
had disappeared from their surfaces and lin- 
gered only in the shadow of the low cliff which 
forms the southern boundary of one. Often the 



THE LAKES OF THE CLOUDS 183 

nights brought frost, and sometimes with the 
rain sleet sifted down as well. But little the 
dwellers in these Alpine heights care for these 
things. If the sun but shines it warms the tundra 
to their root tips and they push their blossoms 
forth to meet it with all speed. The geum flecked 
everything with yellow gold. In the crevices of 
the cliffs it clung where there was little but coarse 
gravel for its roots, and its radiate-veined, kid- 
ney-shaped root leaves flapped in the gales and 
were tattered in spite of their toughness. In 
such soil as the rocks gave the sandwort put 
forth tiny innumerable cups of white. Down in 
the tundra-clad slopes the geum throve as well, 
but there the white of the sandwort was replaced 
by that of countless stars of Houstonia. White 
and gold was everywhere in this flower-garden 
of the clouds, subtended here and there by the 
lavender delicacy of the Alpine violet, Viola 
palustris. Everywhere, too, was the honest, 
plebeian white and green of the dwarf cornel, 
and the aesthetic, green-yellow blooms of the 
Clintonia. It is strange that of two flowers that 
touch leaf elbows all through the woods of this 



i84 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

northern country, high and low, one should be 
so hopelessly bourgeois as the Cornus canadensis 
and the other so undeniably aristocratic from root 
to anther as Clintonia borealis. 

To tramp the slopes and hollows of this gar- 
den about the two lovely lakes is to alternate the 
rasping surface of pitted and weather-worn cliffs 
and scattered boulders of mica-schist with 
plunges half-knee deep in a soft and close-knit 
tundra moss. Here are mosses and lichens in 
close communion that ordinarily grow far apart. 
The sphagnums are to be expected, and they are 
plentiful, but with them grows the hairy-cap 
moss, sturdier and with larger caps than I often 
find it elsewhere. With these also grows the 
gray-green cladonia, the reindeer lichen, all 
massed in together in a springy sponge that holds 
water and plant roots and continually builds peaty 
earth. Because of this building of earth by the 
tundra mosses there are fewer Lakes of the 
Clouds than there were once. In half a dozen 
levels above and below the present lakes this 
constructive vegetation has built up a bog where 



THE LAKES OF THE CLOUDS 185 

once was open water, and makes tiny meadows 
for the quick-blooming plants of the mountain 
season. 

Meadows of this sort climb from the Lakes 
of the Clouds up the ridge toward Boott's Spur, 
connected by underground rills and having little 
springs scattered through them where even in dry 
weather the thirsty may find good water. Up 
the side of the peak of Monroe they go as well, 
and it is not difficult to trace the moisture they 
hold by a glance from a distance, so green and 
pleasant does it make their flower-spangled sur- 
faces. In the lowlands meadows are level or 
they are not meadows. On the mountains they 
sometimes run up at a pretty sharp angle and are 
meadows still. 

In August the spring color scheme of white 
and gold stippled on the tundra moss by the 
geums, the sandwort and the Houstonia becomes 
blue and gold, built out of harebell blooms and 
those of the dwarf Alpine goldenrod, Solidago 
cutleri. There is much more of the gold than 
in the springtime and the blue of the harebells 
by no means is so prevalent as the white of 



i86 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

Houstonia and of Arenaria. But clumps of 
Spirea latifolla put out their pale pink flowers 
in many nooks among the rocks and even insert 
patches of color among the dark firs that under 
the high banks of the lakes dare stand erect, 
though they are at the top of the tree line. 

Most picturesque of all plants about the Lakes 
of the Clouds, in midsummer as in early spring, 
is the Indian poke, Veratrum viride. Next to the 
firs and spruces it spires highest, but unlike them 
it is of no obviously tough and hardy fibre. On 
the contrary, here is an endogenous plant, one 
of the lily family, that ought from its appearance 
to grow in a Florida swamp rather than on the 
great ridges of the Presidential Range, five thou- 
sand feet and more above sea level. Here is a 
place for low-growing Alpine plants like the sand- 
wort, the Alpine azalea, the Lapland rose-bay, 
and the little moss-like Diapensis lapponica ; and 
they grow here. But in the boggiest part of the 
tundra grows also this rank succulent herb, the 
Indian poke, spiring boldly with its light green 
stem, bearing three feet in air its big pyramidal 
panicle of yellowish green blossoms in early 



THE LAKES OF THE CLOUDS 187 

July, vSeed pods in middle August, but yellowish 
green and pyramidal still. Beneath the pyramid 
on the single stem stand the close-set, broadly 
oval, plaited and strongly veined leaves, and there 
the whole will stand till the freezing cold of 
October cuts down its succulent strength. The 
more I see of the Indian poke on Alpine heights 
the more I admire it. It does not quite reach 
the tip of the summit cone of Washington, but 
it climbs as near it as many a seemingly tougher 
fibred plant and would, I believe, reach as high 
as the sandwort could it have roothold in the 
necessary moisture. 

Much has been written about the beauty of the 
Alpine Garden between the base of the summit 
cone of Washington and the head wall of Hunt- 
ington Ravine. All that has been said of this 
and more is true of the rough rocks, the slopes, 
and the meadows about the two little Lakes of 
the Clouds. Traces of animal life indeed are 
rare on their borders. The most that I have seen 
was a deer that came at dawn over the ridge 
from Oakes Gulf, nibbled grass and moss in the 



i88 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

meadows, drank from the larger lake, and 
bounded off again, leaving the tundra moss 
punctured by slender hoof marks. Birds are as 
numerous here as about those other wooded lakes 
of the clouds that lie below in the ravines, Hermit 
Lake in Tuckerman's and Spaulding at the head 
of the Great Gulf. I suspect the Myrtle and 
Magnolia warblers of building their nests in the 
dwarf firs not far from the shores, though I am 
unable to prove it. White-throated sparrows 
sing among the evergreens, though in August, 
in these altitudes, the white throats rarely give 
their full song. Often it is but a note or two 
and pauses there as if the bird were in doubt 
about the propriety of singing at this season. 
But the birds of the place beyond all others are 
the juncos. They sit on the bare ledges and sing, 
morning, noon and night, their gentle, melodious 
trill. It makes the place home to the listener at 
once as it is to the singers whose nests are tucked 
away in holes under many an overhanging stone 
along the ledges. 

" The wind that beats the mountain blows 
more gently round the open wold " in which lie 




o 



o 



THE LAKES OF THE CLOUDS 189 

the two little Lakes of the Clouds. Into their 
tiny hollows the August sunshine wells and seems 
to tip with gold the plumes o£ the spinulose wood 
ferns which grow in the tundra moss and snuggle 
up against the mica-schist ledges that make minia- 
ture cliffs along the shores. Around the base of 
the mountain these ferns are everywhere, taking 
the place in higher altitudes of the Osmunda 
claytonia, which is the prevalent variety of lower 
lands. The progress of claytonia is interrupted 
not far from the entrances to the Gulf and to 
Tuckerman Ravine. Thence the Aspidium spinu- 
losum goes on and is plentiful in many places 
up to and on the Alpine Garden. It makes the 
neighborhood of the Lakes of the Clouds beau- 
tiful with its feathery fronds and sends out to 
the lingerer in this beauty spot its ancient woodsy 
fragrance of the world before the coal age. 
Among all the beauties of the place it is hard to 
tell what is dearest, but I think, after all, the 
decision should be with the feathery, fragrant 
Aspidium spinulosum, the spinulose wood fern. 

But for all their beauty by day and their cosy 
friendliness, the Lakes of the Clouds are at their 



190 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

best after nightfall. As the sunshine welled in 
them, so at dusk the purple shadows grow dense 
there and the shallows disappear. A boy can 
throw a stone across these lakes. He can wade 
them, but as the darkness falls upon them and 
the juncos pipe the last notes of their evensongs 
the little lakes widen and grow vastly deep. The 
farther shores slip away and become ports of 
dreams, and he who stands on the margin looks 
down no longer at bare rocks through transparent 
shallows, but into a universe of fathomless depth 
where star smiles back at star through infinite 
distances of blue. Who shall say it is not for 
this that the little lakes lie through the brief sum- 
mer, clear mirrors under the shadow of the peak 
of Monroe? 



XIII 
CRAWFORD NOTCH 

The Mighty Chasm in the Mountains and Its 
Perennial Charms 

In the nick of the Notch — Crawford Notch 
— the narrow highway so crowds the Saco River 
that, tiny as it is, it has to burrow to get through, 
thereby meeting many adventures in a half mile. 
If Mount Willard had flowed over to the north 
just a few rods farther, when it was fluid, there 
would have been no Notch, but only a gulf like 
that between Washington and the northern peaks, 
or like Oakes Gulf, barred completely by the vast 
head wall of metamorphic rock. It came so near 
that originally there was room only for the Saco 
to pass down, a slender stream, new-born at the 
shallow lake on the plain just above. Then the 
famous old " Tenth Turnpike " of New Hamp- 
shire came along and by smashing away the rock 
and crowding the Saco men made a way through 
for it. As for the railroad, its case was hopeless. 



192 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

It had to burrow a nick of its own through the 
base of Mount Willard, and out of the debris 
of this blasting the road makers built a series 
of fantastic rock piles, monuments to the heathen 
deities of Helter-Skelter, which serve to make 
the gateway in which these three jostle one an- 
other, road, railroad and river, more weird even 
than it was before. 

But the gateway is as beautiful as it is fan- 
tastic. The road south to it comes along a smiling 
plain and the mountains draw in to meet it, in- 
deed as if to bar it. On the left Mount Clinton 
sends down two long ridges between which flows 
Gibb's Brook. On the right Mount Willard 
shoulders its rough rock bulk boldly into the 
way, and down these the spruces stride like tall 
plumed Indians come to bar the passage of the 
white man. But the road winds on and just as 
it seems as if it must stop it finds a way and, 
fairly burrowing as does the river, flows down 
the Notch. With the rocks alone the gateway 
would be a forbidding tangle of debris. Clothed 
in the hardwood growth, it would be but a green- 
wood gap. But these pointed spruces and the 




u 



CRAWFORD NOTCH 193 

firs that mingle with them bring to it an archi- 
tectural dignity of pillars and spires, a jutting 
of Gothic pinnacles, a suggestion of Ionic col- 
umns, that makes it the gateway of a vast wood- 
land cathedral, a place through which one passes 
to worship and be filled with awe and veneration 
of the mighty forces that shaped it. 

It is a cathedral that has its gargoyles, too; 
everywhere through the spiring spruces and the 
softening outlines of deciduous trees protrude 
the rocks in fantastic shapes that show strange 
creatures to the imaginative onlooker. Just at 
the gateway, lumbering out from the mountain, 
comes an elephant, head and trunk, little eye and 
flapping ears plainly visible, poised in granite, 
but ready at any moment to take the one step 
onward that will reveal the whole gigantic animal 
standing in the roadway. Beyond, the whole left 
side of the Notch shows a gigantic face, the 
mountain's brow itself a noble dome of thought, 
the nose huge and Roman, and the whole weird 
and misshapen, but not without a strange dignity 
of its own. And so it is with the whole formation 



194 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

of the Notch. Its once molten rocks cooled or 
have been water-worn into strange forms that 
greet the eye of the imagination at every turn. 
It is well that the narrow turnpike flows so swiftly 
down into the depths of the wood and hides the 
traveller from the sight of too many portents. 
To get down the nick of the Notch just a little 
way by road is to be shaded by the overhanging 
deciduous growth and to be able to forget, as does 
the Saco, the crowding together of those weird 
forms carved by the ages from enduring granite. 
The railroad hangs to its grade on the moun- 
tain side, but the road descends rapidly, though 
not so rapidly as the river that, here a little re- 
leased from its pressure between the two, comes 
to sight again and slips in purling shallows or 
babbles down miniature cascades, the thinnest 
of slender streams, to the depths of a shaded 
cleft in the cliffs known as " The Dismal Pool." 
Dismal this may be to look at from the height 
of the train as it winds along the steep face of 
the Mount Willard cliff. But it is not dismal 
when one gets down to it, in the very bottom of 
the nick of the Notch. In places rough gray 



CRAWFORD NOTCH 195 

cliffs, in others black spruces, climb one another's 
shoulders from this little level of grass and placid 
water where flows the Saco. A pair of spotted 
sandpipers make this their home and they did not 
resent my coming to join them. Instead they 
bobbed a greeting and then went on industriously 
picking up dinner, wading leg deep in the shal- 
lows and often putting their heads as well as 
their long bills under water in search of food. 
Spotted sandpipers nest in the summer from 
Florida to Labrador, but I fancy no pair has a 
finer home than this little pool in the very bottom 
of the vast cleft in the mountains which is Craw- 
ford Notch. Its shores were netted with the 
tracks of their nimble feet. 

No other bird track was there, but the sand- 
pipers by no means monopolize the borders of 
this shallow water. Here were the marks of 
hedgehog claws, and there was a track which 
led me to pause in astonishment. What planti- 
grade had set foot of .such size on the soft sand 
of the shore? I looked over my shoulder after 
the first glimpse, half expecting to see an old 
bear, for here was what looked very like the 



196 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

track of a young one. A second look told me 
better. This footmark, not unlike that of a 
human baby, save for the claws, was no doubt 
that of a raccoon, but certainly the biggest rac- 
coon track I have seen yet. It was perfectly 
fresh, and I dare say the owner, interrupted in 
his frog hunt by the sound of my scrambling 
approach beneath the black growth, had but then 
shambled to some den in the nearby cliffs and 
was impatiently awaiting my departure. 

The flower of the place was the little, her- 
baceous St.-John's-wort, Hypericum ellipticum, 
in whose linear petals such sunlight as reached 
the bottom of the cleft seemed tangled. It grew 
everywhere on the narrow margin between the 
black shade of the spruces and the clear, shallow 
water, and its petals shone out of a soft mist 
of tiny white aster blooms in many places. Far- 
ther up stream, and indeed in most woodland 
shadow throughout the Notch, grows the Eupa- 
torium urticsefolium, which, though its common 
name is " white snake root," is nevertheless the 
daintiest of the thoroughworts. Its flowers are 
a finer, whiter flufT of mist than are those of 



CRAWFORD NOTCH 197 

the aster, so plentiful on the shore of the not 
dismal pool and which I take to be aster ericoides. 
In late August they seem to me quite the most 
beautiful flowers of the Notch woodlands. In 
this I do not except the blue harebells which 
grow so plentifully on the sandy flats down by. 
the Willey House site. Above the tree line the 
harebells are beautiful. Here they are strag- 
gling and pale and are not to be compared with 
their hardier, sturdier sisters. 

As railroad, highway and river draw together 
and touch elbows in passing through the gateway 
of the Notch, so do all other tides of travel. 
Here in spring should be the finest place in the 
world to see all migrant birds on their way 
farther north. The valley of the Saco catches 
them as in the flare of a wide tunnel and gradu- 
ally draws them together here. At certain cor- 
ners in London all the world is said, sooner or 
later, to pass. So at the gateway of the Notch 
one should see in May and June all north-bound 
varieties of birds. Even at this time of year the 
wandering tribes concentrate at this spot and 



198 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

bird life seems far more plentiful than at any 
other equal area in the mountains. On the bare 
heights of the Presidential Range, which I had 
been travelling for long, the juncos are one's only 
bird companions. Here in deep forest glades 
variety after variety passed singing or twitter- 
ing by. Here were robins, song sparrows, chip- 
ping sparrows, white-throated sparrows, chicka- 
dees in flocks. Red-eyed vireos preached in the 
tops of yellow birches. A yellow-throated vireo 
twined and peered among the twigs, gathering 
aphids. Here were myrtle and magnolia war- 
blers and a blackpoll, all residents in the neigh- 
borhood without doubt, but all on their way, and 
seen in a brief time. 

Most pleasing of all to me was a strange new 
chickadee voice which sang something very like 
the ordinary black-capped chickadee song, but 
with a slower and far different intonation. I 
followed the maker of this old song with new 
words over some very rough country, from one 
side of the Notch just below the nick to the 
other, for I was very eager to see him. By 
and by I found him with others of his kind 




^ 






CRAWFORD NOTCH 199 

swinging head down from twigs, climbing and 
flitting in a fashion that is that of all chickadees, 
but had a quality of its own, nevertheless. Here 
was a flock of chickadees, with less of nervous- 
ness in their manner and a little more poise, if 
I may put it that way, than the blackcaps have, 
chickadees with brown crowns instead of black, 
and, I thought, a little more of buff in their 
under parts. All summer I had looked for the 
Hudsonian chickadee on one mountain slope after 
another, and I had not found him. But here in 
the nick of the Notch a flock had come to me and 
I did my best to see and hear as much as possible 
of them. They, too, were on their way, but 
were probably residents of the neighborhood, for 
I took them to be one family, father, mother and 
Ave youngsters, just learning to forage for them- 
selves. This they did in true chickadee fashion, 
swinging and singing, flitting and sitting, and 
always following and swallowing food, to me in- 
visible, with great gusto. 

The song was what pleased me most. One 
authority on birds has written it down in a book 
that the song of the Hudsonian chickadee is not 



200 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

distinguishable from that of the blackcap, though 
uttered more incessantly. Another, equally re- 
liable, says the notes are quite unlike those of the 
blackcap. My Hudsonian chickadees sang the 
blackcap's song, but they sang it a trifle more 
leisurely and with a bit of a lisp. But that is not 
all. There is something in the quality of the 
tone that reminded me at once of a comb concert. 
It was as if these roguish youngsters had put 
paper about a comb and were lustily singing the 
prescribed song through this buzzing medium. 
It may be that other Hudsonian chickadees sing 
differently. Birds are intensely individualistic, 
and it is hardly safe to generalize from one flock. 
This may have been a troupe doing the mountain 
resorts with a comb concert specialty and tuning 
up as they travelled, as many minstrels do, but 
the results were certainly as I have described 
them. I am curious to see more birds of this 
feather and see if they, too, conform, but I fancy 
Crawford Notch is about the southern limit of 
the variety in summer, and I may not hear an- 
other serenade in passing. These certainly found 
me as interesting as I did them. They fearlessly 



CRAWFORD NOTCH 201 

flew down on twigs very near me and looked me 
over with bright eyes, the while talking through 
their combs about my characteristics and how I 
differed from the Hudsonian variety of man. It 
was a genuine case of mutual nature study. 

Very cosy all these things made the nick of the 
Notch, but now and then as I scrambled through 
its rough forest aisles the mountains looked down 
on me through a gap in the trees, frowning so 
portentously from such overhanging heights that 
I was minded to jump and flee from the imminent 
annihilation. For, after all, the beauty of flowers 
and the friendliness of birds, the architectural 
decorations of the firs and spruces, even the mon- 
ster semblances of the rock carvings that over- 
hang, are but the embroidery on the real im- 
pression of the Crawford Notch. To get this it 
is well to go down the long slope of the highway, 
ten miles and more, till you emerge below Saw- 
yer's River where Hart's Ledge frowns high 
above Cobb's Ferry. Thus you shall know 
something of the length of this tremendous fold 
in the rock ribs of the earth. Here is no work 



202 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

of erosion alone. The Notch was made primarily 
by the bending of the granite of the mountain^ 
that rise in such tremendous sweeps on either 
side to heights of thousands of feet. On most 
of their swift-slanting sides some dirt and debris 
of rock has accumulated and the forest has 
clothed them, but this clothing is thin and in 
many places the slant is so swift and the surface 
so smooth that the rock lies bare to the sun, and 
all streams have swept it clean. In August little 
water comes down these, but there is the bare 
channel of brown rock up which one may look 
from the highway, taking in the whole sweep 
of a stream at a glance. At the bottom of these 
swift glissades the tangled piles of smashed rocks 
show with what force the waters come down 
when floods push them. 

Thus just below the nick of the Notch you 
may see where the Silver Cascade and the Flume 
Cascade hurry down from their birth on Mount 
Jackson, and farther down the vast slope of 
Webster is swept clear in great spaces where 
now only a little water comes moistening the 
upper rim of rocks, spreads, and evaporates be- 




u 



u 



■iz t-' 



-f! S 



s 



y. 



M -a 



CRAWFORD NOTCH 203 

fore it has passed over the slanting, sun-heated 
surface. All the way down the glen, to the Wil- 
ley House, to Bemis, and on to Sawyer's River, 
one looks to the right and left up to rock heights 
swimming more than a thousand feet in air, 
bare, immanent, cleft and caverned, and often 
carved to strange semblances of man or beast. 
Crawford Notch is a veritable museum of gigan- 
tic fantasies. 

Most impressive of all it is to pause at the 
site of the Willey House and look back toward 
the gateway of the Notch, through which you 
have come. Here the mighty bulk of Mount 
Willard lifts sheer from the tree-carpeted floor, 
six hundred and seventy feet in air, a mountain 
that once in semi-molten form flowed into place 
across the wide valley and blocked it with a 
solid rock, overhanging, seamed and wrinkled, 
showing projecting buttresses and withdrawing 
caverns, a rock so solidly knit and compact that 
the wear of the ages on it has been infinitesimal. 
On the summit of this cliff are the hammer 
marks of frost. These blows and the solvent 
seep of rain may take from the mountain a 



204 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

sixteenth of an inch in a hundred years, but the 
disintegrating power that spHts ledges and hurls 
hundred-ton rock from precipices seems never 
to have worked on this cliff, so perpendicularly 
high and mighty does it stand. 

First or last the visitor to the Notch will do 
well to climb Willard and see it as a whole. 
An easy carriage road makes the ascent, stop- 
ping well back from the brow of this tremendous 
cliff. Willard is hardly a mountain. It is rather 
a spur, a projecting ledge of the Rosebrook 
Range, whose peaks, Tom, Avalon and Field, 
tower far above it. But on this great ledge of 
Willard one is swung high in air in the very 
middle of the upper entrance to the Notch. 
Hundreds of feet of it are above him still, but 
thousands are below, and he looks down the 
tremendous valley as the soaring eagle might. 
Soothed by distance the rough valley bottom 
seems as level as a floor, its forest growth but 
a green carpet on which certain patterns stand 
out distinctly, the warp of green deciduous 
growth being filled with a dainty woof of fir, 




CJ 



CRAWFORD NOTCH 205 

spruce and pine. To the left the bulk of Web- 
ster blocks the horizon. To the right the glance 
goes by Willey and on down to Bemis and Nancy, 
and the blue peaks of other more distant moun- 
tains that peer over them. From the head wall 
of the Great Gulf, looking down between Chand- 
ler Ridge and the Northern Peaks of the Presi- 
dential Range, one gets a view of a wonderful 
mountain gorge. The outlook from Mount 
Franklin, down the mighty expanse of Oakes 
Gulf to its opening into the Crawford glen below 
Frankenstein Cliff is, to me, more impressive 
still. But greatest of all in its beauty of detail 
and its simplicity of might and grandeur is this 
ever-narrowing, ten-mile chasm, this mighty, 
deep fold of rock strata that begins below Saw- 
yer's River and ends where the enormous rock 
which is Mount Willard so pinches the gateway 
to the Notch that the railroad burrows, the 
highway excavates and the tiny brook which is 
the beginning of the Saco River dives out of 
sight between the two, to reappear in that " dis- 
mal pool " which lies at the very bottom of the 
nick of the Notch. 



XIV 

UP MOUNT JACKSON 

The Climb from Crawford's Through an 
Enchanting Forest 

Off Mount Jackson runs a tiny brook. I do 
not know its name, but because it is the very 
beginning of the Saco River and because it 
empties into Saco Lake, I fancy it is Saco Brook. 
Whatever its name it is fortunate above most 
White Mountain brooks in that the lumbermen 
have kept away from it for half a century or 
so and the great growth of an ancient forest 
shadows it. At the bottom of this it dances 
down ledges and under prostrate trunks of trees 
that have stood their time and been pushed over 
by the wind, and as it goes it splashes joyously 
to itself in a liquid flow of language that has 
as many variations of syllables and intonations 
as has human speech. On either side its wind- 
ing staircase in the forest old, old hemlocks rise 
in columnar dignity and great yellow birches 



UP MOUNT JACKSON 207 

spread the climbing walls of its passageway with 
a leafy tapestry of gold and green, their once 
crisp, sun-imprisoning curls of yellow bark all 
gray with age and as shaggy as those on a cen- 
tenarian's head. Through such shady glens of 
cool delight the little brook calls the path up 
Jackson from its beginnings at the cellar-hole 
of the old Crawford homestead and the path 
responds gladly, climbing within sound of this 
melodious monologue a pleasant part of the way. 
Even after it turns, reluctantly one thinks, to 
breast the slope southward and leave the friendly 
brook behind, the way leads still through this 
fine old forest whose moist gloaming fosters the 
growth of all mosses and through them in turn 
makes the forest tenure secure. Nor does it pass 
into the full sun until its two and three-quarters 
miles to the summit of Jackson are all but com- 
pleted and it climbs steeply out of dwarf firs and 
spruces to surmount the bare dome. How ex- 
cellent the moist moss which deeply clothes 
stumps, stones and all things else, is for the 
growing of firs and hemlocks may be easily seen. 
Here no seedling need fail to grow^ for lack of 



2o8 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

moisture, even if it fall on the very top of a 
high rock. Here is a fir, for instance, beside the 
path up by Bugle Cliff. Its first rootlets ran 
from the very top of a boulder down each side 
of it through this soft, moist covering of moss 
till they reached the ground beneath. There as 
the years have passed they sunk deep and the 
fir has become a fine tree, though the base of 
its trunk is five feet from the ground and its 
two big roots straddle the rock on which they 
first found frail tenure in the thin covering of 
moss. Once let the sun in on this to dry out 
the moisture and the seedling would have evapo- 
rated with it. Thus the trees protect the moss 
and the moss protects the trees. Remove either 
one and the other must go. 

This golden gloom and persistent moisture 
fosters other evergreen growth than firs and 
mosses. Here thrives and grows beautiful the 
spinulose wood fern, which seems peculiarly the 
fern of the high mountain slopes. But more con- 
spicuous along this path to the summit of Jack- 
son are the polypodys. The polypody stands 



UP MOUNT JACKSON 209 

drought or cold equally well. In either it shrivels 
and seems to wither, but let the warmth or 
moisture needed come back and the seemingly 
blighted fronds fill out and are vigorously alive 
once more. I often find polypodys in summer on 
exposed rocks seemingly crisp and dead with the 
drought. But when the September rains have 
soaked them I come by again and find them" 
growing as huskily as before. Yet for all their 
persistence throughout weather torment these 
ferns are most beautiful and luxuriant in spots 
where moisture persists, and they have uninter- 
rupted growth throughout their summer season. 
Such a spot is the deep wood along this trail, 
and there, on such rocks as they favor, the poly- 
podys set close fronds of a green that seems 
singularly bright and rich in shade. It may be 
that the diffused gold of the sunlight in such 
places brings out greens at their best, but surely 
nowhere else have I found these little ferns at 
once so luxuriant in growth and so beautiful in 
color. 

For all that, not all rocks in this delectable 
woodland bear the picturesque decoration of the 



2IO WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

polypody fronds. Up by Bugle Cliff are two great 
cubical boulders. On the level top of one of 
these is a splendid garden of the little ferns. 
They cover it with an even matted growth that 
looks like a marvellously woven and decorated 
mat covering a mighty footstool that might have 
been left behind by some recently departing race 
of giants. Yet within a stone's throw of it is 
another rock, quite like it in size and shape, on 
which one or two straggling ferns are trying 
to get a foothold, but with very indifferent suc- 
cess. So through this as other woodlands it 
seems to be with the polypody, which is without 
doubt a fern of feminine nature in spite of its 
sturdiness. With one rock Miss Polypody will 
dwell in woodland seclusion most happily all her 
days; with another of similar shape and size 
she will have no dallying. The cause is no doubt 
to be sought in the character of the rock rather 
than in its figure or consistency. The polypody 
has a predilection for lime, and it is probable 
that the rocks which they decorate so faith- 
fully have their characters sweetened by this 
ingredient. 



UP MOUNT JACKSON 211 

But ill' these forest shades if every stone may 
not bear wilful Miss Polypody upon its breast 
none goes without decoration of beauty. With- 
out the mosses and lichens the ferns would find 
little chance for life in any forest, and here they 
cover all things with a beauty that is as profuse 
as it is delicate. No rock nor stump nor grow- 
ing trunk of forest tree but has these, so won- 
derfully blended in their grays and greens, their 
olives and browns, that the eye accepts them as a 
whole and, in such perfect harmony is their 
adornment, half the time fails to note that they 
are there at all. Yet one has but to pick out a 
definite spot and examine it for a moment to 
be impressed with the prodigality of beauty of 
the whole. Here, for instance, not far from the 
point where the trail up Mount Webster diverges 
from that up Jackson, is a pathside rock of 
rough, micaceous granite such as mosses love. 
Its surface slopes like a lean-to roof toward the 
north and is but a foot or two square. It is 
no more beautifully, no more diversely decorated 
than ten thousand other rocks which one may 
see along the trail. Yet here is a harmony of 



212 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

blending and contrasting colors and forms such 
as the cleverest human artist with all the fabrics 
and all the dyes of Christendom might labor in 
vain to produce. 

Tiny fern-like fronds of the dainty cedar moss 
weave across it a tapestry of golden green, a 
feathery fabric such as only fairy workmen, 
laboring patiently for long years, can produce. 
Yet it is a fabric common to the whole wood, 
carpeting and upholstering its inequalities for 
miles. Into this is sparingly wrought an over- 
pattern of deeper green tufts of the hairy-cap 
moss, sending up slender stems headed with 
fruitage and holding the pointed caps which are 
the fairy headgear. To note these is to realize 
suddenly that the fairies are still at work under 
the shadow of the warp and woof of the fabric, 
though they are too nimble to be seen, however 
suddenly one may lift it. It is easy to lift the 
hairy caps, but I refrain. To take even one 
away is to spoil the perfect symmetry of this 
pattern which is so complete that every detail, 
even the most minute, is needed for the harmony 
of the whole. On one side an hepatic lichen 



UP MOUNT JACKSON 213 

spreads a rosette-like decoration of purple-brown 
edged with silvery gray, a color that has its an- 
swering glints all through the structure of the 
cedar moss and which joins the brown hepatic 
in all its roughness to this dainty background. 

In another spot is the gray mist of a clump 
of reindeer lichen, a fine, soft, green-gray mist, 
blowing across from the other lichen's edge and 
clouding with its filmy fluff a tiny portion of the 
picture. It is thus that summer clouds float 
over the green tops of the forest trees on some 
days and shadow them with a gray mist for a 
moment. The reindeer lichen is growing on the 
stone, but it has all the effect of being blown 
across it, and I know well that if I look away 
for a moment it will be gone when I look back. 
Diagonally across the rock runs a bar dextra of 
Clintonia leaves, loosely laid in shining green, 
and in certain groups are the trifoliate scallops 
of the wood-sorrel. The whole is like a shield 
of one of the great knights of Arthur's court, 
heraldic emblazonry thick upon it, hung here in 
the greenwood while its bearer rests upon his 
arms or drinks perhaps from the waters of the 



214 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

Silver Cascade brook which I hear swishing 
coolly down the glen not far away. 

But all this decoration, so wonderfully har- 
monious, so minutely complete in itself, is, on this 
particular rock, but a background for a clump 
of pure white Indian pipe blooms, growing in 
its centre. Ghostlily beautiful, their white glow- 
ing by contrast in the green gloom of the place, 
these blossoms seem the plant embodiment of 
the cool echo of falling waters that slips along 
the aisles of flickering, golden light between the 
brown, straight columns of the firs and hemlocks. 
The nodding, pallid flowers are as soothing to 
the sight as is this soft whisper of descending 
streams to the ear. The forest writes the word 
" hush " in letters of the Indian pipe blooms. 

With eye and ear as well as muscles rested, 
I go on to the steeper ascent which the path 
makes through a tangle of firs that diminish in 
size but increase in numbers as the elevation in- 
creases. For long it climbs within sound of 
Silver Cascade brook, but finally gets too high 
for it and passes into a little section of silver 



UP MOUNT JACKSON 215 

forest, where for a space all the firs are dead. 
Most of them still stand erect, the green all gone 
out of them. Ghosts of the trees they once were, 
they stand silvery gray in the midst of the green 
wood, as if a patch of moonlight had forgotten 
to go when the day came. Into this sunlit place 
in the surrounding shade of the forest the moun- 
tain goldenrod has come till its flowers make all 
the space beneath the dead trees yellow, a very 
lake of sunlight. Silver and gold the rocks of 
the White Mountains may or may not have in 
their veins, but the White Mountain forests hold 
the two precious metals in nuggets and pockets 
and veritable placers for all who will seek. 

Not far from this silver forest the path crowds 
through a dense tangle of dwarf firs and climbs 
out upon the rough rock dome of Mount Jack- 
son, 41 12 feet above the sea level, just rising 
above the tree line. Here, to be sure, are a few 
dwarf firs, not knee high, and here climbs plen- 
tifully the resinous perfume of their taller 
brothers just below, but the eye has an unin- 
terrupted sweep of the horizon where few ranges 
obstruct. Northward, fifteen miles or so across 



2i6 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

Oakes Gulf, looms Mount Washington, 2181 
feet higher still, and the long ridge of the 
southern peaks descends from this to Clinton, 
a mighty wall of perpendicular rock set against 
the sky. The vast basin of the gulf is always 
a marvel, with its precipitous walls and its ex- 
panse of forested floor, the forest so distant and 
so close set that it looks like the cedar-moss 
tapestry on the way up; but nowhere is it more 
impressive than from the summit of Jackson, 
with its mighty wall of the Presidential Range 
for a background. Southeast Kearsarge lifts its 
clean cone over the jumble of mountains that 
make the northward walls of the Crawford 
Notch; southwesterly stands Carrigain, with the 
pinnacles of the Sandwich Range far beyond; 
while westerly Lafayette rises above Guyot and 
the Twins, far over Zealand Notch. Under 
one's feet, almost, lies the green level of the 
Fabyan plateau with its huge hotels giving al- 
most the only human touch to the view. Out 
of this depth of distance swings a flock of eaves- 
swallows, already, like the occupants of the 
hotels very likely, planning their southern trip 



UP MOUNT JACKSON 217 

and discussing accommodations and gastronomic 
possibilities. In the upper woods of the trail 
I had passed through a considerable flock of 
Hudsonian chickadees, but these had fallen be- 
hind and the only birds of the summit were the 
swift passing swallows. Here again were the 
summit herbs of the higher hills, the mountain 
sandwort, mountain cranberry, creeping snow- 
berry, Labrador tea, all springing from mosses 
in scant soil which obtains in the almost level 
acre of rock which is the top of the mountain. 

It is a place on which to make rendezvous 
with the winds of the world and be sure they 
will meet you there, yet, strange to relate, on 
my day on the summit for a long time no winds 
blew and gauzy-winged insects from the regions 
below fluttered lazily over the great rock dome. 
Here were colias, hunter's, mourning cloak and 
mountain fritillary butterflies, making the place 
gay with their bright colors. Here were a score 
of varieties of diptera and hymenoptera, some 
of astonishing size and peculiarities of wing and 
leg, some of amazing brilliancy of color, till I 



2i8 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

wished for a convocation of the Cambridge En- 
tomological Society to name and describe them 
for me. None of these unexpected mountain 
flyers was difficult to capture. Neither was I, 
and I was glad when a sudden breeze from the 
west sent them all careering down into the Oakes 
Gulf whence I dare say they came. 

Passing the silver forest on my way down 
I found my Hudsonian chickadee friend in num- 
bers in the firs once more. Much as I have been 
in the woods about the Presidential Range it is 
only lately that I have met these interesting 
birds, and now I seem to find them in increas- 
ing numbers, at the head of the Notch, on the 
northerly slope of Mount Pleasant, and here. I 
have sought them for long, and at last, as Tho- 
reau said of the wild geese, they fly over my 
meridian and I am able to bag them by shoot- 
ing up chimney. Perhaps a more reasonable in- 
terpretation would be that now the nestlings are 
full fledged and the increased flocks beginning 
to range far in search of food. August passes 
and the wind out of the north has sometimes 
in it a zest that collects flocks and sets the mi- 



UP MOUNT JACKSON 219 

gratory instinct to throbbing in many a bird's 
breast. 

No tang of the north wind could touch the 
heart of the deep woods down the trail, but there, 
too, as I descended I found the promise of au- 
tumn written in many colored characters in the 
enchanting gloom. The Clintonias spelled it in 
the Prussian blue ink of their ripe berries. The 
creeping snowberry had done it in white and the 
Mitchella, Gaultheria, and Trillium in varying 
shades of red. Even the Indian pipe which 
writes " hush " and " peace " all along the forest 
floor in late summer seems in this way to tell 
of the season of rough winds, migrating birds 
and falling scarlet leaves that is just ahead of 
us. Its pallid attempt to hold the full glory of 
the ripened summer where it is cannot succeed 
here on the high northern hills where the sum- 
mer is at best but a brief sojourner. Rather, 
for all its desires, it seems but a pale flower of 
sleep, presaging that white forgetfulness of snow 
that will presently descend through the whis- 
pering hemlock leaves and blot out all this writ- 
ing on the forest floor. 



220 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

Ah, these wise old hemlocks of the deep trails 
of the Northern woods! These indeed of the 
forest primeval, 

" Bearded with moss, in garments green, indistinct in the 

twiHght, 
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, 
Stand Hke harpers hoar with beards that rest on their 

bosoms. " 

These are the wise old men of the woods. Erect 
and tall, of mighty compactness of muscles and 
shaggy headed with deep green, conical capes 
shielding crown and shoulders, they seem less 
trees than woodland deities, and to stand among 
them is to be present at an assembly of demi- 
gods of the forest. The wisdom of centuries, 
blown about the world by the west winds, 
finds voice in their whispering leaves, and I, 
listening in the cool twilight below, hear it told 
in forest runes. Some day someone who loves 
the woods enough shall learn to translate this 
runic rhyme of the harper hemlocks as their tops 
chant to the west wind and send the music down 
the listening forest aisles where the Indian pipes 
whitely whisper *' hush " and " peace " — and 
the translator will be very wise thereby. 



UP MOUNT JACKSON 221 

He who climbs Jackson shall see much beauty 
of wild gulfs and rugged peaks, and this I saw. 
But more vividly in my memory of the trip linger 
the sunny glade under the silver firs all yellow 
with its flood of goldenrod, and the moss-clad 
rocks with their messages written in white In- 
dian pipe blooms. Most vivid of all is the per- 
sonality of those stately old-man hemlocks that 
stand with such dignity, making the deep woods 
along the trail. 



XV 

CARRIGAIN THE HERMIT 

The Mountain and Its Overlook from the 
Very Heart of the Hills 

On no peak of the White Mountains does one 
have so supreme a sense of upHft as on Carri- 
gain. Here is a mountain for you! No nubble 
on top of a huge tableland is Carrigain but a 
peak that springs lightly into the unfathomable 
blue from deep valleys of black forest. So high 
is this summit that from it you look through the 
quivering miles of blue air right down upon the 
mountains in the heart of whose ranges it stands 
and see them reproduced in faithful miniature 
below, a relief map on the scale of an inch to 
the mile. In the very middle of the mountain 
world you see the mountains as the eagle sees 
them, and so isolated is the peak that like the 
eagle you seem to swim in air as you watch. 

The black growth of spruce and fir climbs 
Carrigain from all directions. Over from Han- 



CARRIGAIN THE HERMIT 223 

cock it swarms along the ridge from the west- 
ward. From the Pemigewasset it sweeps up- 
ward, and from Carrigain Notch it leaps twice, 
once to the round summit of Vose Spur, a clean 
bound of almost two thousand feet, then on to 
another higher point, and again to the moun- 
tain top. Up Signal Ridge from the east and 
south it scales almost perpendicular heights for 
a mile, leaving only the thin, dizzy edge of this 
spur bare and going on by the sides to the top 
of the main mountain. The path to the summit 
makes its final assault through this black growth 
to the knife edge of Signal Ridge by one of the 
most desperately perpendicular climbs in the 
whole region. One or two trails are steeper, 
a little, notably part of that from Crawford 
Notch up Mount Willey, but none holds so grimly 
to its purpose of uplifting the climber for so 
great a distance as does this. Four and a half 
miles of pleasant journey in from the railroad 
station at Sawyer's River, this mighty ascent be- 
gins a strong upward movement at the old lum- 
ber camp known as " Camp 5." Thence for 
about two miles it goes up in the air at a most 



224 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

prodigious angle, with no suggestion of let up 
till the dismayed and gasping climber finally 
emerges on the knife edge of the ridge summit 
and willingly forgives the mountain for all it 
has done to him. If the climb had no more to 
give than just this outlook from Signal Ridge 
it were worth all the heart failure and locomotor 
ataxia it may have caused. 

' Right under the onlooker's feet the north side 
of the ridge drops away almost sheer to the 
deep gash in the mountain, which is Carrigain 
Notch. Across the valley rises the sheer wall of 
Mount Lowell, with a great, beetling cliff of red 
rock half way up intersected by a slide, the whole 
looking as if giants had carved a huge, prepos- 
terous figure of a flying bird there for a sign 
to all who pass. The summit of Lowell is far 
below the observer's feet, and the whole mass 
is so small a thing in the mighty outlook before 
him that it seems ridiculous to call it a moun- 
tain. It is but an insignificant knob on the uni- 
verse in sight. Over beyond its rounded sum- 
mit rise others, little larger or more significant, 
though each really a mountain of considerable 



CARRIGAIN THE HERMIT 22^, 

size, each part of the western wall of Crawford 
Notch, Anderson, Bemis and Nancy, and beyond 
again the sight passes between Webster and 
Crawford, on and up the broad expanse of Oakes 
Gulf to Washington itself. Here always is bulk, 
magnificence and dignity, and between it and the 
nubbles which mark the line of the southern 
peaks rises a glimpse of the northern, Jefiferson 
peering over Clay, but Adams and Madison with- 
drawn behind the looming bulk of the summit 
cone of Washington. Between Washington and 
Crawford runs the long Montalban Ridge with 
the Giant Stairs conspicuous as always, but 
dwarfed to pigmy size in the great sw^eep of the 
whole outlook. 

Easterly is a great jumble of the mountains 
south of Bartlett, Tremont in the foreground 
and over that Bartlett-Haystack, Table with its 
flat top, the peaked ridges of the Moats, and 
beyond them all the perfect cone of Kearsarge 
on the eastern horizon. There is something of 
the same feeling of supreme uplift to be felt on 
the summit of Kearsarge as one gets on Carri- 
gain, though in lesser degree. Kearsarge, too, 



226 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

is a mountain that dwells somewhat apart from 
other mountains and gives the climber the full 
benefit of this height and withdrawal. As the 
glance swings to the southward again it stops 
in admiration on the blue wall of the Sandwich 
Mountains, the great horn of Chocorua first ar- 
resting the gaze. Here is a splendid outlook 
upon the full sweep of this great, jagged range, 
Paugus, Passaconaway, Whiteface, Tri-pyramid 
and Sandwich Dome, each rugged peak rising 
out of the blue mass of the whole, with the 
green Albany intervales along the Swift River 
showing below their foothills, and over it all, far 
to the south again, the low line which is the 
smoke haze of cities, a brown brume behind the 
exquisite soft blue of the uncorrupted mountain 
miles of air. 

At the bottom of a scintillant blue transpar- 
ency of this air lies the high valley between 
Signal Ridge and the Sandwich Range, a moun- 
tain valley with no hint of green fields or farm 
steadings in it. Its green is that of the rich 
full growth of leaves in deciduous tree-tops, 
shadowed here and there by the point of a fir 



CARRIGAIN THE HERMIT 227 

or a spruce, still strangely standing, though the 
lumbermen have long since swept the valley far 
and wide. Almost one may determine the exact 
height of spur cliffs above the valley bottom by 
the line of black growth where it has escaped 
the axe, not because axemen could not reach it, 
but because horses could not be found to drag 
it to the valley after being cut. The lumbermen 
put their horses in upon acclivities now that were 
thought to be forever inaccessible twenty years 
ago, but there are still heights they do not dare, 
and the lines beyond which they fail are marked 
along all steep slopes by that dividing line be- 
tween the green of deciduous trees and the black 
of spruce. Seen from the great height of this 
knife-edge ridge the valley is grotesque with its 
lifting crags of rough cliff, so solidly built of 
rock that no green thing finds a crevice in which 
to grow, or so steep as to defy any wind-borne 
seed to find a lodging there. These rough rock 
cliffs have grotesque resemblance to the shaggy 
heads of prehistoric animals of more than gigan- 
tic size that seem to have been turned into stone 
where they lie, their bodies half buried and con- 



228 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

cealed by the luxuriant growth of forest that 
still surges round them. A lumber company is 
known by its cut. The work done here seems 
to have been done with a certain feeling of fair 
play to the forest, a desire to give it a chance 
to ultimately recover. Westward, deeper into 
the heart of the wilderness, one sees a.nother 
record. 

To see the west one must climb beyond Signal 
Ridge. High as it is it is but a spur of the 
main mountain that looms, spruce-clad, all along 
the western sky, and the path rises steeply again 
through this spruce, but not so steeply as it 
climbed the ridge. Midway of the half-mile one 
finds the tiny log cabin of the fire warden of 
the mountain, snuggled beneath the spruce be- 
hind the shoulder of the ultimate height. What- 
ever this lone watcher on the mountain top is 
paid he earns, for all furnishings for his tiny 
cabin, all supplies, even water, must be packed 
on his back up the two miles of dizzy trail. 

On Carrigain's very top is a little bare spot 
surrounded by dwarf spruce and fir over whose 
tops you may look upon the world around. The 



CARRIGAIN THE HERMIT 229 

dark tree walls of this roofless refuge ward off 
all winds, and the full sunshine fills it to the top 
and seems to ooze thence through the black 
growth and flow on down the mountain sides, 
which are so near that a few steps in any direc- 
tion takes you to a spruce-clad precipice. Some 
mountain tops are broad and flat enough to form 
the foundation for a farm, but not this one. It 
is a veritable peak. Signal Ridge is a good deal 
of a knife edge. Here you have the edge pro- 
longed into a point. 

A step or two west out of this sun-filled spruce 
well of refuge on the summit takes one to the 
finest view of all from this swimming mountain 
top. Underfoot lies the broad wilderness val- 
ley of the Pemigewasset, filled with what, from 
this point of view, are minor nubbles, but which 
really are lesser mountains. Just to the right, 
far below, is a whole string of three thousand- 
foot eminences, yet the sight passes over them, 
almost without notice, to the magnificent gap in 
rock walls, which is Zealand Notch. Almost due 
west is Owl's Head and half-a-dozen lesser 
heights, but all these sink unnoticed below the 



230 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

blue wall of solid mountain range which blocks 
the horizon above them, the tremendous uplifted 
bulk of the Franconia Mountains. Not the 
grandeur and dignity of Washington, lifting the 
sphinx's head from the Presidential Range, not 
the jagged line of the Sandwich peaks cutting 
with points of distance-blued steel the smoke 
opalescence of the far southern sky, not the 
emerald marvels of all the low-lying ranges all 
about, can compare in beauty or impressiveness 
with that mountain mass of solid blue that walls 
the west across the rugged miles of the Pemige- 
wasset Valley. Its great mass of unblurred, un- 
divided color holds the eye for long and gives 
it rest again and again after wandering over 
the thousand varied beauties of the surrounding 
landscape. Lafayette, Lincoln, Haystack, Lib- 
erty are its famous peaks, which, however they 
may seem upon nearer view, from the dizzy pin- 
nacle of Carrigain, across the broad wilderness 
of the Pemigewasset Valley, hardly notch the 
sky that pales above that mighty wall of deep 
blue, that restful mass of immensity, that un- 
fathomable well of richest color that once looked 



CARRIGAIN THE HERMIT 231 

into holds the eye within its shadowy coolness for 
long and stays forever in the memory. 

What a world of black-growth wilderness this 
vast Pemigewasset Valley must once have been 
it is easy to see. What it will become in just 
a few years more, alas! is too easy to be in- 
ferred. The modern lumberman comes to his 
work equipped with all the vast resources of 
capital and scientific machinery. In this region 
west of Carrigain, which still holds a remnant 
of virgin growth of pine and spruce, where still 
stand trees four or five feet in diameter at the 
butt, his logging trains rumble down his rail- 
road through the deep woods, summer as well 
as winter. The sound of dynamite explosions 
scares bear and deer as his road builders grade 
and level the roads down which his armies of 
men and horses will haul the splendid timber as 
soon as the snow flies. From Carrigain sum- 
mit I see the long winding line of his railroad, 
clear up to the western slopes of the mountains 
that wall in Crawford's Notch. From the rail- 
road to the right and the left run the carefully 
graded logging roads, high up on the sides of 



232 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

the surrounding mountains, branching, parallel- 
ing and giving the teams every opportunity for 
careful, methodical work. 

Already over square miles of mountain sides 
you see the brown windrows of slash left in the 
wake of his choppers, who have left literally not 
one green thing. The black growth cut for the 
lumber and pulp mills, the clothes-pin men and 
the makers of ribbon shoe pegs have been in 
and taken the last standing scrub of hard wood. 
Mountain side after mountain side in this re- 
gion looks like a hayfield, the brown stubble 
marked with those long, wavering windrows of 
slash. These are the newly cut spaces. One 
winter's work took out of this region over thirty 
million feet of pine and spruce alone. There is 
written on the open book of the forest below 
Carrigain the story of the most ruthless, clean- 
sweep lumbering that I have ever seen in any 
wood. You may go down the Pemigewasset and 
see the slopes that have been cleaned out thus 
over square mile after square mile of mountain 
side, four, eight, twelve years ago, and, save for 
blueberries, blackberries and wild cherry trees. 







rf ^ 



CARRIGAIN THE HERMIT 233 

they are as bare and desolate to-day as when 
first logged. In a hundred years those slopes 
will not again bear forests; indeed, I doubt if 
they ever will. Nor is this to be said in any 
scorn of the lumberman. Pulp and lumber we 
must have. He bought the woods and is using 
them now for the purpose for which he spent 
his money. The scorn should rather be for a 
people who once knew no better and who, now 
that their eyes are opened, still allow this price- 
less heritage of ancient forest to be swept away 
forever. 

It is good to shift the eye and the thought 
from these bare patches to the still remaining 
black growth. Fortunately some steeps still defy 
the keenest logging-gang and some spruce will 
remain on these after another ten years has 
swept the valley clean. On the high northern 
slopes, well up toward the peaks, where the deer 
yard in winter, the trees are too dwarf to tempt 
even the pulp men, who take timber that is 
scorned by the sawmill folk. On the summit 
of Carrigain trees a hundred years old and 
rapidly passing to death through the senile 



234 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

decay of usnea moss and gray-green lichens are 
scarcely a dozen feet tall. Yet as these pass the 
youngsters crowd thickly in to take their places 
and grow cones and scatter seed, often when 
only a few feet high. In these one sees a faint 
hope for the reforestation of the valley in the 
distant future. There, after the clean sweep, 
we may allow fifty years for blueberries and 
bird-cherries, a hundred more for beech, birch 
and maple to grow and supply mould of the 
proper consistency from their falling leaves in 
which spruce and fir seedlings will take root. 
After that, if all works well, another hundred 
will see such a forest of black growth as is going 
down the Pemigewasset daily now on the flat 
cars of the logging railroad. 

Carrigain's peculiar birds seem to be the 
yellow-rumped warblers, at least at this season 
of the year. They flitted continually through 
and above the dwarf trees of the summits. 
There they had nested and brought up their 
young, and now the whole families were com- 
ing together in flocks and beginning to move 
about uneasily as the migration impulse grows 



CARRIGAIN THE HERMIT 235 

in them. All along the trail up Carrigain and 
back I found this same spirit of movement in 
the birds. Two weeks ago they were moulting 
and silent. Hardly a wing would be seen or a 
chirp heard in the lonesome woods. Now all 
is motion in the bird world once more and flashes 
of warbler colors light up the dark places with 
living light. Among these black spruces the red- 
start seems to me loveliest of all. No wonder 
the Cubans call him " candelita " when he comes 
to flit the winter away beneath their palm trees. 
His black is so vivid that it stands clearly de- 
fined in the deepest shadows and foiled upon it 
his rich salmon-red flames like a wind-blown 
torch as he slips rapidly from limb to limb, flar- 
ing his way through the densest and deepest 
wood. The myrtle warblers were the birds of 
the summit, but the redstarts gave sudden beauty 
to the slopes all along the lower portions of the 
trail. 

The sun was setting the deep turquoise blue 
of the Franconia Range in flaming gold bands 
as I left the mountain top. The peak of Lafay- 
ette was a point of fire. Garfield, just over the 



236 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

shoulder of Bond, was another, and it seemed 
as if the two were heliographing one to another 
from golden mirrors. But along the knife edge 
of Signal Ridge lay the shadow of Carrigain 
summit and the dwarfed growth down the two 
miles of steep descent was black indeed. Hardly 
could the sunlight touch me again, for the trail 
lies in the eastward-cast shadow of Carrigain 
all the way to Sawyer's River. The evening 
coolness brought out all the rich scents of the 
forest, for here to the east of Carrigain the de- 
ciduous growth makes forest still. From the 
heights the rich aroma of the firs descended with 
me, picking up more subtle scents on the way. 
Not far below the crest of Signal Ridge the 
mountain goldenrod begins to glow beside the 
trail. Scattered with it is the lanceolate-leaved, 
flutter-petalled Aster radula. These two lent to 
the aromatic air the subtle, delicate pungency of 
the compositse, and far below, in the swampy 
spots at the foot of the declivity, the lovely, 
violet-purple Aster nov3e-angli?e added to it. 
Here in open spots beside the trail this beauti- 
ful aster starred the gloom for rods, but yet it 



CARRIGAIN THE HERMIT 237 

was not more numerous than the rosy-tipped, 
white, podlike blooms of the turtle-head that in 
the rich dusk glowed nebulously among them. 
Nowhere in the world do I remember having 
seen so many turtle-head blooms at one time as 
in the marshy spots along the trail leading 
toward Livermore and Sawyer's River from the 
base of Signal Ridge. Their soft, delicate per- 
fume began to ride the fir aroma there, mingling 
curiously with the scent of asters and goldenrod. 
Often I looked back for a glimpse of the lofty 
peak I had left, but Carrigain is indeed a hermit 
mountain. It had withdrawn into the heart of 
the hills which are its home, and nothing west- 
ward showed save the rose-gold of the sunset 
sky which hung from the zenith down into the 
gloom of the woods, a marvellous background 
for the tracery of its topmost leaves. 



XVI 
UP THE GIANT'S STAIRS 

The Back Stairs Route up this Curious 
Mountain 

My way to the Giant's Stairs lay over the 
high shoulder of Iron Mountain, where the road 
shows you all the kingdoms of the mountain 
world spread out below, bids you take them and 
worship it, which perforce you do. Then it 
swings you down by a long drop curve into a 
veritable forest of Arden, through which you 
tramp between great boles of birch and beech for 
miles. Here long ago Orlando carved his initials 
with those of Rosalind on the smooth bark of great 
beech trees and, I doubt not, hung beside them 
love verses which made those pointed buds open 
in spring before their time. Here came Rosalind 
to find and read them, and carry them off treas- 
ured in her bodice, wherefore one finds no traces 
of them at the present day. Yet the carven ini- 
tials remain, as anyone who treads the road be- 




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fyi 


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UP THE GIANT'S STAIRS 239 

neath these ancient greenwood trees may see. 
Little underbrush is here and no growth of 
spruce or fir, and one may look far down ar- 
cades of green gloom where the flicker of sun- 
light through leaves may make him think he sees 
glints of Rosalind's hair as she dances through 
the wood in search of more poems. The long 
forest aisles bring snatches of joyous song to 
the ear, nor may the listener say surely that this 
is Rosalind and that a wood warbler, for both 
are in the forest, one as visible as the other. 
The whole place glows with the golden glamour 
of romance, and he who passes through it, bound 
for the Giant's Stairs, thrills with the glow 
and knows that his path leads to a land of 
enchantments. 

By and by the trail drops me down a sharp 
descent, and at the bottom I find, close set with 
alders, a tiny clear stream which soon babbles 
out from beneath the bushes into another of 
those forest aisles; and there is a little house 
in the wood, so tiny and so picturesquely a part 
of its surroundings that, though it purports to 



240 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

be a hunter's camp, I know it at once for that 
little house which Peter Pan and the thrushes 
built for Wendy. But the song of the brook, 
this serpentine of the deep woods, is a lonesome 
one, for the door of the little house is locked 
and the shutters are up. If I remember rightly 
Wendy went away and never came back, and 
Peter Pan is so rarely seen, now-a-days, that 
few people really believe he is to be found at 
all. But at least here is his house, on a tributary 
to Rocky Branch Creek, over northwest of Iron 
Mountain. 

\Out of the illusory gloom of the brook the 
path leaps with joy to the clear sunlight of open 
fields and seems to stop at an old doorstone be- 
hind which the ruins of a house still strive to 
shelter the cellar over which they were built. 
Floors and sills are gone, boarding and shingles 
and upright timbers have fallen, but still the oak 
pins hold plates and rafters together, and the 
bare bones of a roof crouch above the spot, so 
sturdy was the work of the pioneers that here 
hewed a home out of the heart of a forest. 
Between this spot and civilization is now only 



UP THE GIANT'S STAIRS 241 

a logging road for miles, and the presence of 
these open, sunny fields in the deep forest, and 
among rough hills, seems almost as much an 
illusion as the echoes of the voice of Rosalind 
in the deep woodland glades and the thrush-built 
house of Peter Pan by the brookside. But here 
they stand in this cove of the mountains, field 
after field, still holding out against the sweep 
of the forest that for half a century has done 
its best to ride over them, still loyal to the dreams 
of whose fabric they were once the very warp. 
The old highway, too, still loiters from farm to 
farm, though the wood shades it and in places 
even sends scouting parties of young trees out 
across it. The growing maples push the top 
stones from the old stone walls, brambles hide 
the stone heaps and fill cellar holes with living 
green. Yet still the apple trees hold red-cheeked 
fruit to the sun from their thickets of unpruned 
growth and scatter it in mellow circles on the 
ground for the deer and the porcupine. The 
forest will in time make them its own. It will 
shade out the European grasses that still grow 
knee deep and fill their places with dainty cedar 



242 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

moss and the shy wild flowers of the deep wood. 
Yet for all that the trail of the pioneers, the 
boundaries that they set and the work of their 
hands will never be quite disestablished on the 
spot. It will remain for long years to come a 
sunny footprint of civilization, dented deep in 
the surrounding green of the wilderness. 

Down one gladed terrace after another, from 
one farm to the next, the old road goes, and the 
path, which seems to linger at the first door- 
stone, slips finally away and follows between the 
ancient ruts. Through gaps in the investing for- 
est I look far down the Rocky Branch Valley 
to the blue of Moat Mountain, a color so soft 
that it makes the great mass but a haze of un- 
reality to the perceiving senses. If a wind from 
the west should come up and blow it away, or 
if some scene shifter of the day should wind 
it up into the sky above, just a part of a beauti- 
ful drop curtain, I should hardly be surprised. 
I do not care to climb Moat, if indeed there be 
really sitch a mountain. All summer it has hung 
thus, a soft haze of half reality, a mountain 



UP THE GIANT'S STAIRS 243 

painted on some portion of the view from what- 
ever hill I climb, its contour changing so little 
from whatever direction I view it that it seems 
what I prefer always to keep it, the blue fabric 
of a half -wistful dream. So shall it be more 
permanent and in time more real than many a 
higher summit, the grind of whose granite has 
left its mark upon me. It is the unclimbed peaks 
which are eternal. 

From the last terrace of the lowest farm the 
trail drops suddenly to Rocky Branch, a tribu- 
tary of the Saco which has its rise in a deep 
angled ravine far up on the southerly slope of 
Mount Washington. Here is a choice of ways, 
a good tote road, a logging railroad, and a 
broad, graded logging road which the lumber- 
men are dynamiting through to the last spruce 
of the valley, up at the headwaters of the branch. 
From these highways broad logging roads give 
me a plain trail up the steep Stairs Brook Valley 
to the bottom step in those mighty stairs. He 
who would know what lumbermen can do in 
logging precipitous spots may well look about 
him here. The ground rises at tremendous 



244 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

angles from the ravine bottom to the foot of 
Stairs Mountain, and on, yet down these preci- 
pices the woodsmen have brought their log-laden 
teams safely, the sleds chained and the whole 
load lowered inch by inch by snubbing lines. 
To note the spots into which men have worked 
is to have a vivid impression of the value of 
spruce and the desperate lengths to which men 
will go to get it now-a-days. 

The Giant's Stairs are more in number than 
the two great ones that appear to the eye from 
a long distance, either east or west. Northeast 
of these a half mile or less is a side stair, as 
big and as steep as the ones most commonly 
seen, and farther on around the mountain toward 
the north are others. It was these back stairs 
that I climbed, all because of a yellow-headed 
woodpecker that flew by the ruins of the logging- 
camp which are not far from the base of the 
side stair. I got a glimpse of the yellow crown 
patch and of some white on the back or wing 
bars, but whether it was the Arctic three-toed 
woodpecker or the American I could not make 



UP THE GIANT'S STAIRS 245 

out, and I followed his sharp cries and jerky 
flight up the steep slope to the right of the side 
stairs. Here was an astounding tangle of wind- 
rowed slash with many trees still standing in 
it, and here for a long time I got near enough 
to my bird to almost make sure which variety 
he was, but not quite. It is hard to distinguish 
markings, even black and white, when a bird is 
high on a limb against the vivid light of a moun- 
tain sky. It is easy to follow along the parallel 
roads through which the logs have come down 
out of the slash, but it is another matter to 
struggle from one road to another across those 
mighty tangles, and thus my woodpecker led me. 
Finally at the very top of the col between Stairs 
Mountain and its outlying northeasterly spur he 
shrieked, quite like a soul in torment, and flew 
away high over my head, straight toward the 
summit of Mount Resolution, leaving me some- 
what in doubt as to whether he was Picoides 
Arcticus or Picoides Americanus, or a goblin 
scout sent out by the giants to toll strangers 
away from the easier path up their mountain 
and lose them in the wilderness tangle all about 



246 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

it. Whatever he was he had led me some miles 
romid the mountain to a point exactly opposite 
to the good path up. 

The back stairs are formidable enough to 
dismay anyone with mere human legs, and for 
some time I wandered in what the lumbermen 
have left of a hackmatack swamp at their foot, 
looking for a way about the bottom stair, for 
only Baron Munchausen's courier — he of the 
seven-league boots — could have gone directly 
up it. It felt like being a mouse in a mansion, 
and by and by I found a very mouse-like route 
up detached boulders loosely held in place by 
spruce roots, scrambling up trunks and clawing 
on with fingers and toes, in momentary fear of 
starting an avalanche and becoming but a very 
small integral portion of it, and I finally reached 
the top of the bottom back stair, which is by 
all odds the highest, and sat down to get breath. 
At one scramble I had left behind the woful 
tangle of slash and come into a country of en- 
chantment. Here a bear had passed the day 
before, leaving undeniable signs. There was a 
deer path through the dense spruce showing re- 



UP THE GIANT'S STAIRS 247 

cent dents of their sharp, cloven hoofs, and all 
about and above was a forest of black growth, 
in which it was easy to fancy no human foot 
had ever trod, before I all-foured up into it, 
mouse fashion. Here were trees not large 
enough to tempt the lumbermen, but old with 
moss and gray-green lichens, casting so dense 
a shade that only mosses and lichens could flour- 
ish beneath them. 

Here was a soft carpet of dainty cedar moss, 
wonderfully fronded and luxuriant, covering 
everything, — rocks, roots and the trunks of 
ancient trees that had fallen one across another 
for unnumbered centuries. It was like a minia- 
ture of the close-set tangle of downwood and 
growing timber that one sees in the Puget Sound 
country. There for miles one may make prog- 
ress through the wood only by clambering along 
one fallen trunk to the next, perhaps twenty 
feet in air. Here the fallen trunks and grow- 
ing trees were not one-tenth the size of the 
Pacific coast giants, but the proportion and con- 
dition was the same. And so up through this 



248 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

fairyland I scrambled and plunged, following a 
deer path as best I might and longing for their 
sure-footed ability to leap lightly over obstacles. 
I daresay my clattering plunges drove all the 
deer off the mountain. At least I saw none, 
though their paths intersected and their hoof- 
marks had dented them all recently. Stairs 
Mountain is certainly the house of a thousand 
staircases. All through my climb I found de- 
tached stairs scattered about, and the mountain 
seems to be largely built of them, from a few 
feet to a few hundred feet in height. 

And after all I came out, not at the top of 
the highest front stair, but at the top of that 
side stair that looks directly down on the old 
lumber camp. A half mile or less southeast of 
me were the front stairs, and I had to go down 
an internal flight and climb again before reach- 
ing their top, passing again through forest 
primeval criss-crossed by deer paths. The yel- 
low-headed woodpecker had given me a pretty 
scramble, but I think it was worth it. 

From a distance I had thought Stairs Moun- 
tain to be fractured slate. Instead it is moulded 




1) ^ 



UP THE GIANT'S STAIRS 249 

granite. The edge of the tread on the topmost 
stair is of a stone that seems as hard and dense 
as any that comes out of the Quincy quarries. 
Yet still clinging to it in places are remnants 
of a crumbly granite that seems once to have 
been poured over it and cooled there in a friable 
mass. You may kick this overlying granite to 
pieces with your hob-nailed mountain shoe, and 
I fancy once it filled the gap between the top- 
most tread and the summit of Mount Resolu- 
tion, just to the south, and has been frost rid- 
dled and water worn away leaving the solid 
granite of the stairs behind. 

From the topmost of the Giant's Stairs one 
sees but half the mountain world, — the half to 
southward. All the north is cut off by the 
spruce-covered round of the summit behind him. 
Eastward was the great bulk of Iron Mountain, 
over which I had come, its round top so far 
below me that I could see the whole of the per- 
fect cone of Kearsarge over it. Directly south 
was the half bald dome of Resolution, and just 
over it the equilateral pyramid of Chocorua 



250 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

dented the sky. Wonderfully blue and far away 
it looked, and to its right was stretched the 
varied sky-line of the whole Sandwich Range. 
To the right again was a mighty walderness of 
mountains, cones and billows and ranges massed 
in together in almost inextricable confusion, 
though out of this rose certain peaks one could 
not fail to recognize, — Carrigain, stately and a 
bit apart in dignified reserve, and the great blue 
wall of the Franconia Range, diminished by dis- 
tance but beautiful and impressive still. Almost 
at my feet, down the Crawford Notch, crept a 
train along the thin, straight line of the railroad. 
A puff of white steam shot upward from the 
engine whistling for the Frankenstein trestle, 
but it was long before the shrill sound rose to 
my ears. Nothing could so well emphasize the 
immensity of the prospect before me. I realized 
that the brakeman was walking through the ob- 
servation car shouting, " Giant's Stairs ! Giant's 
Stairs now on your left ! " and that the mighty 
cliff on whose verge I was perched seemed no 
more than a letter on the printed page to the 
onlooking crowd. 



UP THE GIANT'S STAIRS 251 

The way home Hes down the west side of the 
mountain, the steep but good Davis trail to and 
along the bottom of the lower stair, thence to 
the west side of the ridge between Stairs Moun- 
tain and Mount Resolution. Then a trail east, 
very slender but distinguishable, goes to the 
broad highway of a logging road, and thence the 
descent, though precipitous, is easy. The Stairs 
Mountain is so different from anything else that 
one can find in this region that it has an eerie 
individuality all its own. To look back as I 
went on down the logging road was to see the 
stairs standing out against the glow of the lower- 
ing sun, less like steps than gigantic rock faces. 
The lower one particularly looked as if a giant 
himself, wild-eyed and bristly haired, was lying 
behind the forest with his great head leaned 
against the mighty granite cliff that towered 
above. And so I left him, waiting doubtless to 
devour the next lone climber who, if he goes up 
the front stairs, must pass directly in front of 
his jaws. For all that I hesitate to advise the 
back stairs route to which the yellow-headed 
woodpecker led me. It is rough — and chancey. 



XVII 

ON MOUNT LAFAYETTE 

Glimpses of Coming Autumn from Franconia's 
Highest Peak 

Upon the highest mountain tops the winds of 
winter make their first assaults tipon the sum- 
mer, driving it southward, peak by peak. In 
September the skirmishes begin, and by the end 
of October the conquest of the high peaks is 
complete, but meanwhile the outcome of the 
contest is by no means sure, and day by day, 
sometimes hour by hour, the redoubts are won 
and lost again. Mid-September sees the ap- 
proaches to the peaks fluttering gayly the ban- 
ners of both chieftains, summer's blue and gold 
in the asters and goldenrod, winter's crimson 
and gold in the flare of maple and the glow of 
yellow birch. Thus I saw them from the sum- 
mit of Lafayette on a day when the forces of 
the north met those of the south there and the 
long ridge was now in the hands of one army, 



ON MOUNT LAFAYETTE 253 

now of the other. Nor was it difficult to 
prophesy what would be the outcome of the con- 
flict. It seemed as if moment by moment the 
yellow banners of winter, planted almost on the 
very summit in the leaves of the dwarf birches, 
increased in number and crowded farther down 
the slope and into the forests of the outlying 
spurs. Now and then, too, the eye noted where 
a shell had exploded in a goldenrod bloom, or 
so it seemed, and blown its summer banner out 
of existence in a white puff of pappus smoke. 
So the wind out of the north drives the sum- 
mer away, though it rallies again and again and 
comes stealing up the southerly valleys and 
along the sunny slopes to the very summits. 

Near the high summits the birches show au- 
tumn tints first. These are of the round-leafed 
variety of Betula glandulosa, which is peculiar 
to the high peaks of the White Mountains. 
Very dwarf at best, on the highest peaks they 
win as near the top as do the dwarf firs, yet 
at humiliating expense of stature, becoming 
scarcely more than creeping vines at the great- 



254 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

est heights, sending up doubtful branches out 
of the protection of soft tundra moss. Up the 
higher slopes of Lafayette they thus grow, 
crowding together in dense masses that now 
spread a velvety golden carpet to the eye that 
looks upon them from the summit. Amidst the 
gray and brown of ledges and the green of 
spruce and fir, which is so deep that it is black, 
they glow by contrast and put the goldenrod of 
the lower glades to shame with their color. No 
other deciduous trees reach this height, and in 
looking at them in the early weeks in September 
it is easy to believe that autumn comes down 
from the sky and first, like jocund day, stands 
tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. On Lafay- 
ette the color was richest near the top and paled 
into green as the glance slipped farther and far- 
ther down toward the Pemigewasset Valley. 

• Even by the middle of September the birches 
of the valleys show little of the marvellous yel- 
low that seems suddenly to come upon them a 
little later. From the mountain-top they still 
hold the full green of summer to the first glance, 
and only by looking again and more carefully 



ON MOUNT LAFAYETTE 255 

can one see that they have changed. Then, in- 
deed, Httle cirrus clouds of yellow mist them 
in places, rounding the low hilltops a little more 
definitely against the more distant wood. To 
look again is to see here and there the undeni- 
able flaunt of a yellow banner, but from the 
hilltops, that is all. To tramp the levels along 
the water-courses or climb the lower slopes be- 
neath deciduous trees is to see more, and to 
learn that the autumn tints come by other routes 
than a descent upon the summits. For weeks 
in the cool seclusion of the forest aisles the ways 
have been lighted by yellow flares of birch or 
elm leaves and red flashes of the swamp maple. 
Day by day now these increase in number, and 
once in a mile the whole tree seems to have 
caught all the sunshine of the summer in itself 
and to begin to let it glow forth in the half- 
dusk of the woodland shadows. 

In places it is as if autumn had set candles 
along these dusky cloisters to light pilgrims to 
some shrine, and in many a hollow glade one may 
think he has found the shrine itself, — an altar 



256 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

perhaps of gray rock covered with a wonderful 
altar cloth of dainty cedar moss all patterned 
with polypody ferns, and with a great birch 
candelabra stretching protecting arms above it, 
all alight with a thousand candles of yellow 
leaves. The heat of the September sun above, 
ray-filtered by the feathery firs, is caught in 
these yellow leaves that hold back the last of its 
fire and set the place about with a cool, holy 
glow, an illumination that is like a presence be- 
fore which one must bow down in reverent 
adoration. After all it is not a defeat that has 
come to the fiery forces of summer that have 
so well held the hills; it is a conversion. 

In the cloistered seclusion of the woods one 
knows this, and that seclusion obtains for much 
of the four-mile climb to the summit of Lafay- 
ette. Once or twice on the way the gray brow 
of Mount Cannon looks in through gaps in the 
foliage, from its great height, seeming to lean 
across the Notch and peer solemnly down from 
directly over head, so narrow is this deep defile 
between two mighty mountains. A mile up and 
the trail leans to a brief level, where it bridges 




"On the way the gray brow of Mount Cannon looks in through 
the gaps in the foHage " 



ON MOUNT LAFAYETTE 257 

the chasm between the spur of the mountain 
which is Eagle Cliff and the main mass. Here 
at a glimpse comes an idea of what happened 
when the mountains were made. The whole 
Franconia Range, one thinks, must have come up 
out of the hard-pressed levels of the earth in 
one great rock mass, from which the founda- 
tions settled and let portions lean away and split 
off. Here in the Eagle Cliff Notch is a great 
gap of the splitting, now more than half filled 
with fragments of the rock which fell away in 
enormous chunks when the action took place. 
Rocks the size of a city block lie here roughly 
placed one upon another with caverns of un- 
known depth made by the openings between 
them. Out of these caverns wells up on the 
hottest days a cold that undoubtedly comes from 
ice that forms in depths to which no man's eye 
has penetrated, and that remains the year 
through. The clinging of gray lichens upon 
these rocks has made roothold for the dainty 
cedar moss which makes them green and holds 
moisture in turn for the roots of firs that grow 
from the very rocks and fill their gaps with 



258 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

forest. Here where once was titanic motion is 
now titanic rest, and out of summer sun from 
above and winter coolness from below wild 
flowers build tender petals and distil perfumes 
the brief season through, asters and goldenrod 
lingering still in the crannied wall, the cool airs 
that made them late in blooming equally delay- 
ing their passing. In this green gap in the gray 
granite summer's conversion is long delayed, 
though winter waits just below her flowers the 
whole season through. 

More than a mile the path again climbs 
steeply through closely set evergreens, in whose 
perpetual shade the moist mosses are knee deep 
above all rocks and fallen timber. Nowhere can 
one see better the value of spruce and fir growth 
on mountain sides in the preservation of the 
mountains themselves. Beneath this everlasting 
cushion of wet moss, re-enforced by roots, each 
rock lies in place and nothing short of an ava- 
lanche can stir it. Where the path has let in 
the sunlight on the moss the torrents have 
stripped it clean from the surface and frost and 



ON MOUNT LAFAYETTE 259 

storm year by year gully the opening deeper. 
It is astounding, this sponge of moss that climbs 
to the top with the path, sphagnums and dainty 
cedar moss predominating, but seemingly all 
other varieties intermingled as well. 

And at the top one finds how persistent in its 
withdrawal the summit of a great mountain like 
Lafayette can be. This is only the top of a 
westerly spur, a far greater chunk than Eagle 
Cliff, but only a chunk of the main mountain, 
that also broke oif when the foundations of the 
range settled. Strange to relate, the ravine that 
lies between is choked, not with mighty rocks, 
but with a level that has for a surface at least 
a boggy space in which lie two sheets of water, 
— the Eagle Lakes, 4146 feet in elevation. This 
is no summit; rather it is another notch, and 
the peak of Lafayette lies more than a thousand 
feet farther on into the blue. 

A little above this point the firs cease and the 
moss with them. The rest of the way lies over 
broken stone that has crumbled from rough 
ledges unrestricted by any mossy protection. In 
the gravel ground from it grow some stunted 



26o WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

firs, some very dwarf birches and scattered wild 
flowers, but the way to the summit Hes for all 
that through a desert. From its jagged agglom- 
eration of rocks, scattered on ledges that still 
hold to the main mass of rock which is the 
mountain, one looks north or south along a 
great rocky ridge which is the crest of the 
Franconia Range. North lie the great outlying 
spurs and buttresses of Lafayette, leading across 
a high col to Garfield, which sticks a bare rock 
pinnacle skyward. Southward a well-worn path 
lies along the ridge to Lincoln, Haystack, Lib- 
erty and Flume, each just a rise in the crest 
which lies along the ponderous bulk of really 
one mountain. Garfield is in a certain measure 
ofif by itself, but these others are all merely pin- 
nacles of one great structure, Lafayette being 
the highest. Here as on the Presidential Range 
one finds Alpine plants, conspicuously the tiny 
mountain sandwort, so constant a bloomer as to 
show its white flowers still in mid-September. 
With this, but no others in bloom, were the 
three-toothed cinquefoil, the mountain avens, 
mountain cranberry, mountain goldenrod, bil- 



ON MOUNT LAFAYETTE 261 

berry and Labrador tea, all to be seen on the 
final crest which is Lafayette's summit. 

A north wind out of a clear sky had blown 
at the start of my trip, but as if to prove that 
its day was not yet over, the wind out of the 
south came over the long barren ridge, bringing 
butterflies in its train. For a time the two winds 
seemed to meet at the very mountain top, and 
a yellow Colias, that was the first to come, 
caught between the two, coasted upward and 
disappeared toward the zenith as if even the 
summit of Lafayette were not high enough for 
him. Later, when the south wind had fairly 
driven that from the north back toward the 
Canadian boundary, I saw several of these, 
which I took to be Colias philodice, the common 
sulphur, flitting about the summit, their yellow- 
pale and clear compared with that of the au- 
tumn-tinted birches just down the slope. Two 
mourning cloaks, a Compton tortoise and a 
Grapta progne, made up the list of other butter- 
flies seen. Summer was doing well to be able 
to show even these so late in September on so 
high a summit as Lafayette. I looked curiously 



262 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

for the little gray Oeneis semidea, the White 
Mountain butterfly which is so common in ear- 
lier summer on the Presidential Range and said 
to be confined to it, but I did not see it. Per- 
haps this variety is not to be found on Lafay- 
ette, though the altitude is sufficient, the food 
plants are there, and the same geological con- 
ditions which left this variety " islanded " on 
Washington no doubt apply. 

The south wind which brought up the butter- 
flies and which pushed the north wind back 
brought up also a gray haze which swept in like 
a sea turn. It blotted out the Ossipee Mountains 
and the little Squam Range. For a time the 
Sandwich peaks stood out, deep blue against 
its pale blue blur, then they melted into it and 
were gone. It came on and took Tecumseh, 
Osceola and Kancamagus. Kineo, Cushman and 
Moosilauke were drowned in it one after an- 
other, but still to the eastward Carrigain and 
Hancock showed, and below them the broad 
Pemigewasset Valley was spread out like a map. 
Almost at my feet was the broad swath of ruin 



ON MOUNT LAFAYETTE 263 

which past years of lumbering have cut in this 
once beautiful valley of primeval forest. For 
miles down the western slope of the Franconia 
Range and beyond all valleys are bare and all 
slopes that the utmost daring can climb are 
denuded. On mile after mile, save for, in spots, 
a pale undergrowth of blueberry and wild cherry, 
only dead birches stand, stretching bare white 
bones to the sky in ghostly appeal. Islanded in 
it here and there are peaks and ridges still beau- 
tiful in deep-green evergreens, with just a misty 
touch of the tender yellow of autumn-tinted 
birches, wood too small or too dangerously set 
to tempt the axe. The rest is desert; dignified, 
haughty even in the mighty uplift of its long 
slopes and bare gray crags, but desert for all 
that. 

It is a relief to turn the eye from this to the 
rich green of the unscathed slopes of the Notch 
itself. A thin blue line of air between Eagle 
Cliff and Mount Cannon shows the narrow pas- 
sage where the mountains split apart, perhaps 
to let man and the streams go through. Over 
the way lies Moran Lake, a blue gem among 



264 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

the green ridges of Cannon. At my feet, so 
near it seems, is the round eye of Echo Lake, 
which is at the bottom of the Notch, but seems 
almost as near as the larger Eagle Lake, which 
is but a thousand feet below, far up on the side 
of the mountain. All about are bold, bare cliffs 
showing through the green, but their bareness 
is that of nature, and the deep green around them 
grows, forgetful of the axe, which for many 
long years has not been laid at their roots, per- 
haps never will be again. Southerly the Pemige- 
wasset Valley opened far to the villages of 
Woodstock and on to Plymouth, but even as I 
looked the pale blue haze blotted them out and 
swept on up the valley. The south wind was 
getting into a passion, bringing clouds behind 
and above the haze, putting out the sun and 
growling in gray gusts about the summit. It 
shouted threats in my ears and shook me as I 
went down the zig-zag trail to the shelter of the 
firs about the nearer Eagle Lake. Then it lulled 
and dropped a tear or two of warm rain as if 
ashamed of itself. 

Star Lake, on Mount Madison, is but a puddle 



ON MOUNT LAFAYETTE 265 

among the bare, slatey-coherent rocks of the 
Northern Peaks. The Lakes of the Clouds are 
real lakes, beautifully set, but barren in them- 
selves, their shallow rocky bottoms allowing 
no growth of water-plants. Spaulding Lake at 
the head of the Great Gulf on Washington 
and Hermit Lake at the bottom of the Tucker- 
man Ravine are singularly alike, shallow, trans- 
parent, barren and beautifully set among spir- 
ing firs and spruces, each in the heart of a 
mighty gorge. But here, way up on the high 
shoulder of Lafayette, where one would think 
no lake could possibly be, is a little one in 
a brown bog, — a bog in which the mountain 
cranberry sets its deep red fruit to the sun and 
the snowberry scatters its pearls all over the 
maroon carpet of the sphagnum. Curiously 
beautiful fruit, that of the creeping snowberry. 
Here is a cranberry vine grown slender and 
with tiny leaves fringing it most delicately. 
Here at its tip is an elongated checkerberry, 
waxy, almost transparent white, with an odor 
of checkerberry, a pleasantly acid pulp that re- 
minds one of cranberry and an after-flavor of 



266 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

checkerberry also. If there were prehistoric 
wizards in plant-breeding in these mountains, 
surely one must have cross-fertilized the cran- 
berry with the pollen of the checkerberry to the 
producing of this shy, delicate, hardy and alto- 
gether lovely fruit. To this antediluvian Bur- 
bank it may be that the Old Man of the Moun- 
tain is a statue, erected by a grateful posterity 
in the Notch below. 

In the lake itself grows the tape grass, stretch- 
ing its straw-yellow ribbons along the surface 
and curiously ripening its knobby fruit under 
water. With it in scattered groups was the 
yellow pond-lily, its broad, ovate leaves floating 
and turning up their edges to the gusts of the 
south wind that swung in over the corner of 
the mountain. Strange indeed these familiar 
water plants looked in this little tarn swung 
more than four thousand feet in air on the shoul- 
der of so mighty a mountain. All other moun- 
tain lakes at such heights had seemed weird to 
me in the crystalline barrenness of their purity. 
This one with its boggy shore, its mud and its 



ON MOUNT LAFAYETTE 267 

homely water weeds was so friendlily familiar 
that I lingered long on its banks. The south- 
erly wind had massed its clouds high above the 
Notch, and in their shadow the dusk of early 
nightfall was on the path and deep in the woods 
on my way down. Yet in the bottom of the 
deep defile between Lafayette and Cannon I saw 
the north wind again pressing on to victory, 
scattering the clouds above Mount Cannon and 
letting the sunset light through far over its 
northerly slopes. The nimbus broke into cumu- 
lus clouds, and these to flufifs of cirrus that 
showed at first an angry red. Then this soft- 
ened to pink and finally dimpled into miles of 
gold between which the depths of the sky showed 
a pure blue of forgiveness such as can be found 
in heaven only when one looks up into it from 
the bottom of a deep like that of Profile Notch. 
Not in flowers or gems or in the pure eyes of 
children can be found such a blue as the Fran- 
conia sky showed, out of which night and deep 
peace settled like a benediction on the mountains. 



XVIII 
A MOUNTAIN FARM 

One on Wildcat Mountain the Highest Ever 
Cleared in Nezv England 

Last night the north wind died o£ its own cold 
among the high peaks and black frost bit deep 
down in the valley meadows, killing all tender 
herbage. Then morning broke in a sky of crystal 
clarity, of a blue as pure and cool as the hope 
of Heaven in the heart of a Puritan, through 
miles of which all objects showed as if through 
a lens. From the ledges of Wildcat Mountain 
I looked over to the summit of Mount Wash- 
ington, whose details were so plain that the five 
trains that came up were visible to the naked 
eye, and with glass I could see the people flow 
from them in a slow black stream, its tide flecked 
with the flotsam of fall millinery. So still was 
the air upon the summit that from each engine 
as it came in sight over the ridge stood high and 
straight a cloudy pillar of mingled smoke and 



A MOUNTAIN FARM 269 

steam. The Israelites who of old were thus led 
through the wilderness to the promised land could 
have had no more visible guide. Slowly to the 
mountain rim sank the frosted fragment of the 
once round and yellow moon, a wan, gray ghost 
seeking obliteration in the grayer ledges of the 
summit cone. 

On these gray ledges of the cone the scant 
herbage of the summer clung in flowing, warm, 
tan-brown streaks drifting down as snow does 
from the summit, but coloring only perhaps a 
twentieth part of the surface. All else was the 
gray of the rock, softened by distance into a 
cool delight to the eye. Lower the Alpine Gar- 
den slants toward the ravines, black in patches 
with dwarf firs, soft green in others where in 
moist hollows the grasses and moss still grow, 
but for the most part showing the olive yellow of 
autumn-tinted tundra. Only below this, where 
the garden drops off steeply to the slope between 
Tuckerman and Huntington ravines, was the rich 
yellow of the dwarf birches to be seen, here a 
clear sweep of color, lower still mottled with the 
black growth of spruce and fir. 



270 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

There was never a flame of rock maple in sight 
on all the visible slope of the big mountain, but 
below, in the middle distance of a slope up to 
Slide Peak, below the boulder and from there 
down into Pinkham Notch, they flared, one after 
another, ending in a blazing group whose con- 
flagration was stabbed by the points of the firs 
on the near slope of Wildcat. 

Such beauties as these the mountains set daily 
before the eyes of the man who hewed out the 
highest farm in New England, a century or less 
ago, on the high shoulder of a westerly spur of 
Wildcat Mountain. Few New Englanders are 
farmers now. In the eighteenth century most of 
them were, and the tide of young men who had 
the courage and the brawn to build farms in the 
wilderness rose high in the New Hampshire hills. 
The river-bottom lands were taken up, then the 
lower valleys, then the higher slopes, and finally, 
as the nineteenth century grew, the ultimate 
pioneers landed on the very shoulders of the 
White Mountains. Up the valley of the Wildcat 
River climbed the Fernalds, the Hayeses, the 




-a o 






-a ^ 



A MOUNTAIN FARM 271 

Wilsons, the Merserves, Wentworths, Johnsons 
and half a dozen other pioneer families, each 
hewing out of the terrific timber and grubbing 
out of the grim rocks with infinite labor the fields 
that to this day smile up to the sun. 

Hall, the traditions have it, was the name of 
the highest-minded pioneer, who set his farm on 
a spur of Wildcat, 2500 feet above the sea level. 
He is said to have been an educated man, born 
far down the State and educated in college. 
Tradition has it, too, that he was a poor farmer, 
which is what tradition always says of college 
men who farm. However that may be, he cer- 
tainly was a worker. On his farm acre after 
acre of mighty trees crashed to the ground in the 
wine-sweet mountain air and went up again in 
the pungent smoke of the " burns," whereby the 
first settlers cleared their ground and made ready 
for their primitive first plantings. Gray ledges 
and black soil inextricably intermingled drop 
down his farm from terrace to terrace toward 
the Wildcat River, and on the highest of these 
stood his house. Its foundations only remain 
to-day, showing the vast square occupied by the 



272 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

central chimney. Around the foundations of this 
the cellar lingers, narrow and apologetic. The 
rooms above even must have been rather crowded 
by this leviathan chimney, four-squared to the 
world and with a big fireplace on each side. We 
are apt to think of the houses of the early moun- 
taineers as being cold in winter, but this one need 
never have been. That great bulk of enclosed 
chimney once warmed through would hold the 
heat in its stone heart for hours, and the wood 
for its reheating was so plentiful as to be in the 
way. 

From his door sill to the south the pioneer's 
family looked forth upon the sweet curves of the 
Wildcat River valley at their very feet. From 
the shoaling green of the sea of air beneath them 
it deepens into a richer and softer blue as mile 
runs beyond mile to the spot where Thorn and 
Iron mountains slope toward one another to a 
broad notch through which the glance runs on 
down the Saco to the horizon line where the 
Ossipee Mountains melt and mingle with the blue 
of the sky. Thorn Mountain blocks the lower 
end of the Wildcat Valley, in which the pioneer 



A MOUNTAIN FARM 273 

saw from his doorstone more farms than I see 
to-day. Down the slope of Wildcat beneath him 
a half-dozen since his time have passed to the 
slumber of pasture or on to the complete oblivion 
of returning forest. Over on Black Mountain 
now unoccupied were as many more. But the 
view in the main is the same as he saw on clear 
September days, nor need one think he or any 
other mountain farmer was or is insensible to the 
beauty of it. You rarely get one to talk much 
about it — they all know how poor things words 
are — but they feel the joy of it for all that. 

From the northern edge of Hall's topmost ter- 
race I look forth across a wide gulf of crystalline 
air to the rough slopes and ridges of Wildcat and 
Carter mountains. The middle of September is 
past and autumn is setting the seal of her colors 
deeper and deeper on the high hills. Both moun- 
tains have a saddle blanket, so to speak, of green- 
black dwarf firs, but each of these is decorated 
with a misty featherstitching of yellow birch 
leaves. Below each blanket is a ridge up and 
down which fire swept some years ago. On these 



274 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

ridges great birches, all dead, stand so close to- 
gether that their trunks line it with perpendicular, 
parallel scratches of gray, all cross-hatched with 
a netting of limbs that soften the whole into a 
wonderful warm tone. In the greatest distance 
these scratches blend into a fur that is softer and 
more beautiful than any ever brought into the 
markets of civilization by the Hudson Bay Com- 
pany. Other winter pelts that the mountains 
wear may be warmer, but none can vie with this 
in the delight of its coloration. 

. Down the ridge again the birches thin out and, 
all among them and below, the bird cherry trees 
paint the slope a soft cerise, a color that in the 
distance is but a neutral one, a background for 
the rich hues of the rock maples that climb into 
it from the ravines. Not all these have felt the 
flare of autumn in their blood. Many seem to 
ride toward the summit in Lincoln green. The 
outcry of beagles should be just ahead of them. 
But more have added a scarlet facing to their 
hunting coats, and some others are fairly aflame 
with the richest tint that any autumn leaf can 
get, the flaming crimson of the rock-maple foliage 



A MOUNTAIN FARM 275 

ripened under a full sun where mountain brooks 
soak a primal vigor from the granite and send 
it upward into white cambium layers all summer 
long. The twenty-fifth of September finds the 
hillsides displaying the autumn hunting colors 
for all who follow the hounds. The very sight 
of them sets the blood a-gallop and brings the 
view-halloo to the lips of the most sedate. 

All along the horizon to the east of this highest 
farm stretches the green wall of Black Mountain. 
In the pioneer's day no doubt it deserved its de- 
scriptive title for the spruce growth which clothed 
it, but on the easy slopes this did not last so long 
as the pioneer, and the green of deciduous trees 
which has replaced it belies the mountain's name. 
So high is this wall of green hill that only Double- 
head peers over it, and that by way of a gap in 
the ridge, a little of the purple haze of distance 
setting it apart lest one take it for a part of the 
same mountain. But I fancy the gaze of the 
pioneer passing oftenest a little to the west of 
south, passing the smiling beauty of the valley 
and the stately cone of Kearsarge, to the summit 
of Iron Mountain, where to this day one may see 



2^6 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

the broad cultivated fields of what I believe to 
be the next highest farm in New England, and 
one still occupied by descendants of the pioneers 
that hewed it out on a broad terrace not far 
below the summit. This is the Hayes farm, and 
it is a singular fact that while, according to the 
surveys, the Hayes farm is many hundred feet 
below this site of the ancient Hall homestead, 
and looks it, on the contrary one looking across 
from the Hayes farm thinks himself several hun- 
dred feet above it. In the same way Hall could 
look across to the Gerrish farm on Thorn Moun- 
tain and would surely know that it was far below 
him. Yet on the Gerrish place, looking across to 
Hall's fields, I always feel sure that the Gerrish 
place is much the higher. As a matter of fact, 
a contour map places Hall's house six hundred 
feet higher in the air than that of Hayes and 
eight hundred higher than Gerrish. In so much 
at least was the college-bred farmer superior to 
his good neighbors of other mountain tops. 

Farther westward the highest farmer looked 
in his day as one does now upon an unbroken 



A MOUNTAIN FARM 277 

wilderness where the Giant Stairs break the long 
levels of the Montalban Range and stand blue- 
black against the gold of the sunset. Only on 
the north and northwest was his view broken by 
the highest points of Wildcat Mountain, which 
sheltered him completely from the sweep of the 
winter winds. It is now, as it was then, a wood- 
lot, and from it the forest steadily moves down 
into the open spaces of this highest New England 
farm. The firs and spruces sit about in it now in 
groups, reminding one of dark-plumed aborigines 
that seem to have come back and to be holding 
councils once more in this clearing of the pale- 
face. The unmown grass stands deep all about 
these encroaching forest trees and, lacking the 
care of the farmer, has cured itself and waits in 
vain to be harvested, while all through it the sun- 
light silvers the dry white panicles of the ever- 
lasting, the only flower of the season on these 
terraced fields which so steadily and surely drift 
back to be again the forest from which the 
college-bred pioneer with such labor reclaimed 
them. There is a pungent aroma of old herb 
gardens about this silvery everlasting, though it 



278 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

is essentially a wild flower, that seems to bear 
dreams of the pioneer grandmothers of the lovely 
Wildcat Valley. It is as if in the bright Sep- 
tember sun they came back with silvery hair and 
white kerchiefs and caps, for one more stroll in 
the pleasant fields and one more look at the beau- 
tiful valley below, a landscape than which none 
in New England is more beautiful. 

' The nasal twittering of red-breasted nut- 
hatches led me up the hill above the highest 
cleared terrace into the forest that from its mul- 
tiplicity of fascinating wood roads gives evidence 
of having always been the farm woodlot. The 
pioneer should certainly have loved this hill. It 
sheltered him on all parts of his farm from the 
bite of winter winds out of the northwest. Out 
of its deep heart it gave him water that he had 
but to allow to run to his buildings, and from 
its top the wood which he cut would coast down 
grade to his fireplace. An hour before it had 
been a silent forest filled with a yellow underglow 
of sunlight, doubly distilled from the ripening 
leaves of white and yellow birch. Now, in a 
moment it was filled with quaint twittering and 



A MOUNTAIN FARM 279 

snatches of eerie song. With the nuthatches 
came chickadees, and the red-breasted ones sang 
in part their song, at least an eerie imitation of 
it such as only nuthatches could make. The nut- 
hatches are the goblin acrobats of the deep woo3. 
Gravity may exist where they perform, but it 
does not trouble them. They walk with utter 
disregard to it, and in their evolutions I expect 
any day to see one fly upside down, and, if I were 
mean enough to shoot one, I would as soon ex- 
pect him to fall up into the sky as to fall down to 
the ground. Nor would I be much surprised if 
he hung like Mahomet's coffin, suspended between 
heaven and earth. If brownies ever try to blow 
the notes of the chickadee's song on tiny tin trum- 
pets, ranged in Palmer Cox rows on mossy tree 
trunks, they no doubt get the same result that the 
red-breasted nuthatches did that day in the wood- 
lot of the highest farm in New England. 

Beside this they sang little twittering ditties 
that were quite musical and altogether uncanny 
as well, and seemed to fill the golden woodland 
aisles with all sorts of suggestions of goblin ad- 



28o WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

ventures to be found there. Between me and the 
deep heart of the Carter-Moriah range was un- 
broken wilderness out of which might well come 
any of the phantoms the Pequawkets were wont 
to declare they saw there. Climbing steadily 
toward the top of the long ridge which swings 
round from the old farm to the summit of Wild- 
cat I thought I heard the footsteps of that great 
white moose that breathed fire from his nostrils 
and turned back all arrows before they reached 
him. Nearing the top I knew I heard him — or 
something just as good — an irregular stamping 
which I stealthily approached from behind the 
screen of • gray tree trunks and golden forest 
leaves. 

Almost at the top I could see the shaking of 
boughs from which the creature was browsing, 
and to me, approaching from below and with the 
elfin incantations of the nuthatches still in my 
ears, these seemed very high in air. Some crea- 
ture of prodigious size was just beyond and in 
a moment more a turn of a rock corner revealed 
part of him. A long, lean, white neck I saw, and 
a head stretching high up to a maple limb whence 



A MOUNTAIN FARM 281 

prehensile lips plucked pink-cheeked leaves. Its 
mouth full the creature turned a long face toward 
me and neighed, and the forest aisles echoed the 
spluttering whinny in tones full as uncanny in 
their laughter as had been those of the nut- 
hatches; also vastly louder. Somebody's old 
white horse looked at me with a mild curiosity 
as I tramped up to him on this ridge of the Wild- 
cat wilderness, and at sight of him the spectral 
moose vanished into the past century, there to 
remain with the Indians who claimed to have 
seen him. 

Spectral enough the old horse looked here in 
the deep shadows of the wood. He had " yarded " 
on the hilltop much as deer do in winter. I 
found well-worn trails of his, leading hither and 
thither on the ridge, but none going away from 
it, and, under the shade of a beech, in what had 
tried to be a thick bed of spinulose wood ferns, 
was evidently his nightly bed. He had worn 
the earth bare in his clumsy getting up and lying 
down. Far down the terraces of the old farm 
in sunny glades were pastured other horses and 
cattle. There they stayed, for the feed was good 



282 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

and water near, and they loved the sight of the 
lower pasture bars that will later let them out 
to the road to stalls of which they dream. But 
here was a finer soul than these, a hermit that 
preferred the cool fragrance of wood fern and 
the unmolested quiet of his wooded hilltop, from 
the loopholes of whose retreat he might look 
upon the world. I fancy him the best horse of 
the herd. 

Now and then you find a man like that, and 
I dare say such an one was the maker of the old 
farm. As I came down again into his highest 
field the sun was sinking behind Boott's Spur and 
cool blue shadows stretched out across the low, 
sweet curves of the Wildcat River valley. 
Against them the pale smoke of supper fires rose 
lazily and far over from the gorge below Carter 
Notch floated the hush of falling waters. The 
blue of the mountains to southward deepened 
and only on their summits sat the rose of sunset 
fire. Behind me in the wood was now no sound 
of nuthatches, but a single robin sat in a tree- 
top and sang softly, as if to himself. On such 



A MOUNTAIN FARM 283 

a scene of peace and unsurpassed beauty it is 
easy to fancy the college-bred pioneer looking 
at nightfall and finding it good. If his descend- 
ants descended through the pasture bars to be 
stall-fed in cities, so much the worse for them. 



XIX 

SUMMER'S FAREWELL 

The Blaze of Its Adieu to Mount Washington 

Summer lingers yet just south of Mount Wash- 
ington and, though often frowned away, as often 
returns to say good-bye, " parting is such sweet 
sorrow," Already there have been days when 
the frown was deep, when the hoar frost on the 
summit clung as white as snow in the sun and 
refused to melt even on the southerly slopes, 
when at night the cold of winter bit deep and 
the Lakes of the Clouds shone wan in the morning 
light under a coating of new, black ice. Then 
summer has come back, dissolving the repentant 
frost into tears at a touch of warm hps, bending 
and quivering over the great gray dome of the 
summit until, approaching from peaks to the 
southward, I have seen her presence surround 
all in a shimmering enfolding of loving radiance. 

From the high ridge of Boott's Spur I saw 



SUMMER'S FAREWELL 285 

it thus, slipping back myself to say good-bye, 
of a day in late September. From no point in 
the mountains does one get a finer impression of 
the massive dignity of Washington summit than 
from this. The Spur is itself no mean mountain, 
rising with precipitous abruptness from between 
Tuckerman Ravine and the Gulf of Slides, bound- 
ing in rounding, thousand- foot ledges from Pink- 
ham Notch to a height of more than 5500 feet; it 
lifts the persistent climber to a veritable mizzen- 
top whence he looks still upward to the main 
truck of the summit, with the wonderful rock 
rift of Tuckerman Ravine between, dropping out 
of sight behind sheer clififs at his feet. On such 
an autumn day there is a mighty exhilaration in 
thus floating in blue sky on such a pinnacle. The 
body is conscious that the spirit within it steps 
forth from peak to peak into limitless space and is 
ready to shout with the joy of it. Indian summer, 
which does not come down to the sea-coast levels 
for another month, touches the high ranges now, 
and under its magic they remember spring. It 
paints the brown grasses, the sedges and the 
leaves of the three-toothed cinquefoil which 



286 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

scantily streak the cone of Washington, with a 
purple tint, and the gray rocks themselves ripen 
like grapes with a soft blue bloom in all shadows. 
To me the finest of the four trails which lead 
to the summit of Boott's Spur is that which 
comes up from Pinkham Notch by way of the 
Glen boulder. Its start is through a forest 
primeval. The lumbermen have taken the spruce, 
to be sure, but here are birches along the foot- 
path that may have been growing when Darby 
Field first came this way to the summit of Wash- 
ington with his two Indians, It may be not. 
Birches are quick-growing trees, yet here are 
some that are almost three feet in diameter, hav- 
ing the great solid trunks and shaggy, scant 
heads of foliage which are characteristic of trees 
that reach maturity in a forest before it knows 
the axe. Whatever the trials of the trail it is 
worth while to climb among such trees as these. 
It is a steep trail, in ledgy spots, and it soon 
leads to slopes where the axe has not followed 
the spruce, on to a growth which the axe scorns, 
and on again to a dwarf tangle of firs that are 
hardly to be passed without the cutting of a 



SUMMER'S FAREWELL 287 

canyon. Not in the mangroves of Gulf swamps 
nor in the rhododendron '' sHcks " of the south- 
ern Appalachians can a traveller find a more 
determinedly dense impediment to his passage 
than in these mountain firs where they dwindle 
to chin height and interlace their century-old 
stubs of branches. Farther up they shorten into 
a knee-deep carpet which hardly delays the pas- 
sage, and from these emerges the great cliff on 
whose verge hangs " the boulder." 

He who does not believe that " there were 
giants in those days," that they fought on the 
Presidential Range, and that the head of one, 
cut off and petrified with fear, rolled down to 
this spot where it quite miraculously stopped, has 
probably never seen the boulder from the ledge 
about north of its point of poise. There it looks 
all these things. It has a George Washington 
nose, a Booker Washington chin, and the low 
forehead of the cave man. It has even an ear, 
plugged with a bluish, slaty rock quite different 
from the brown sandstone of which the whole 
is composed, as this is quite different from the 



288 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

various rocks of the ledges round about. Motor- 
ists driving up the Glen road can see the boulder 
ahead of them outlined against the sky. It looks 
from that point as if it might roll down and 
stop the car at any time. But if it looks insecure 
in its position to motorists in the highway, to 
the Alpinist who stands beside it this appearance 
of instability is startling. Jocund day never 
poised more on tiptoe on the misty mountain top 
than does this big rock head on the verge of the 
cliff. I, for one, dislike to go directly below it. 
Some day it is going to roll on down the mountain 
and that might be the day. 

In the clearness of the autumn air all the forest 
of Pinkham Notch and its approaches lay far 
below my feet. The world below was a Scotch 
plaid of equally proportioned crimson and green 
with a finer stripe of rich yellow. Every maple 
is at the height of its flame, but the birches of 
the valley still hold much of their green, at least 
from above. Below them in the forest one walks 
as if at the bottom of a sea of golden light in 
which flecks of other color fall or spring into 
view at each new turn of the path. The hay- 







o 



SUMMER'S FAREWELL 289 

scented ferns are almost as white as the bark of 
the canoe birches. The brakes are a golden 
brown, and all the under-forest world is yellow 
with the leaves of all varieties of birch. Only 
the withe-rod sets splotches of maroon in its 
great oval leaves, and shows among them its deep 
blue of clustered berries. But none of this 
reaches my eye as I sit high in air above it. 
Thence the world below is a Scotch plaid, out of 
which the roar of Glen Ellis Falls rises, the falls 
themselves completely hidden within the plaid. 

More and more of the under-world of birch 
yellow comes to the surface as the trees climb the 
hill till at the last they spread a golden mist of 
color wonderful to behold. At certain portions 
of the slope the firs begin again and go on up 
the hill with the birches, slender and beautiful, 
aspiring and inspiring, and even along among the 
bleak rocks they creep, soft green mats of spread- 
ing limbs, flecked here and there with the yellow 
of creeping birches and the maroon of low blue- 
berries, all this patterned among the exquisite 
lichen-grays of the rocks. All the southerly ridge 



290 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

beyond the boulder is a rolling smoke of these 
golden birch tops pricked through with the green- 
black spires of spruce and fir, nor has any slope 
on any mountain more beauty to offer to the eye 
on this day in late September when the air is like 
a crystal lens through which one looks into un- 
measured distances and sees clearly. 

Behind the boulder, terrace by terrace, the 
mountain rises to the top of Slide Peak, whence 
one may see the magic of the air lenses change 
this mingling of vivid colors to a blend which is 
a rich violet and loses its red as the distance 
grows greater till it ends on the far horizon in 
a pure blue that seems born of the very sky itself, 
and to sleep in its arms. With it the eye floats 
over the ranges that rim the horizon half around, 
touching and soaring from Wildcat and Black 
on to Baldface and on again to be lost in the 
maze of hills that ride eastward into the dim dis- 
tance of the State of Maine. More to the south- 
ward Doublehead lifts his twin peaks in mas- 
sive dignity and over Thorn is Kearsarge, almost 
airy in the contrast of its perfect cone. On again 
southeast and south flash lakes, Silver and Con- 



SUMMER'S FAREWELL 291 

way and Ossipee, Lovell's Pond and in the far 
distance Sebago, lighting the softest blue toward 
a haze that one suspects is the sea. Due south 
between peak after peak, between Paugus and 
Chocorua and through a gap in the Ossipee 
Range lie the waters of Winnipesaukee, shining 
beneath the noonday sun. 

The Gulf of Slides beneath my feet was a vast 
bowl of russet gold decorated with Chinese pat- 
terns of deep green. In its very bottom I saw a 
black stream rounding the edge of a level open 
meadow where the deep grass had been trodden 
into paths by the passing deer. All round about 
it the spruce and firs set a bristling wall of pointed 
tops, and the quivering air that filled the bowl to 
the brim was obviously a liquid. I could see it 
flow up and over the ridge toward the summit of 
Boott's Spur, and as if to prove that it did so a 
red-tailed hawk flapped up from the firs that sur- 
round the little meadow, caught the updrift of 
this southerly breeze and soared on it in easy 
spirals to a point just above the ridge. Here he 
caught another current that came up the Rocky 



292 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

Branch Valley, a breeze resinous with the last 
big area of spruce in sight from the summits near 
Mount Washington, pungent with the smoke of 
the great woodcutter camps in its midst, and 
soared on up Boott's Spur. And as he did so 
the sun flashed back in white fire from a point 
in a ledge of the Spur overhanging the Gulf of 
Slides. 

\ Somewhere in the highest hills hung once the 
great carbuncle whose fame led many early set- 
tlers to dare disaster in mountain searches for 
precious gems. Tradition has it that the great 
gem vanished from its matrix long ago. Perhaps 
it did. But something flashes white fire from a 
high cliff on the Spur to the eye of him who gets 
the sun at just the right angle from Slide Peak. 
The carbuncle may be there yet. Certainly the 
ridge that leads up from the boulder is rich in 
matrices for gems. Out through its granite burst 
veins of sparkling quartz, dazzling white, pink 
and green. Imbedded in this quartz are great 
crystals of silvery mica and smaller ones of black 
tourmaline. There are spots along the trail that 
glitter like a Bowery jeweller's window. This 



SUMMER'S FAREWELL 293 

profusion of gemlike stones is to be found all 
along the way to the high ridge of Boott's Spur 
and make it doubly fascinating. If the great car- 
buncle ever really hung high in the mountains 
I fancy it is still not far from this neighborhood. 
Very likely it broke from its cliff and lies now 
buried in the debris of slides at the bottom of 
the great precipice which springs from the Gulf 
up to the top of the Spur, leaving only a frag- 
ment to dazzle my eyes from the top of Slide 
Peak. Perhaps the real thing is there yet, and 
I recommend the Glen Bowlder trail to present- 
day gem hunters. 

But from the mountain tops on the last days 
of September all the world is one of gems. From 
Washington the range and the Southern peaks 
which rise from it showed ruby fires of sunlight 
transmitted by the colored leaves of creeping 
blueberries and the three-toothed cinquefoil. 
Lower, emerald and bloodstone glinted among 
the dwarf firs, and lower yet were zones of gold 
for the setting of as many gems as the forest 
could furnish. All the blue stones of the lapidary 



294 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

showed their colors in the distance while the 
woods of the lower slopes were chrysoprase, gar- 
nets, topaz and all other stones which hold red, 
yellow or green glints in their hearts. Looking 
westward only the centre of the Fabyan plateau 
lacked this plaiding of interwoven gem colors. 
Instead it was a level oasis of tender green 
around which sat the great hotels in solemn 
sanctity. 

The perfect clearness of this still mountain air 
was not only for the sight but for the hearing. 
One's ear seemed to become a wireless telephone 
receiver and sounds from great distances were 
plainly audible. Voices of other climbers, I do 
not know how far away, seemed to come out of 
the ledges of the high ridge of Boott's Spur as 
I sat among them and looked toward the great 
gray summit of Washington. Among the Derry- 
veagh Mountains in the northwest of Ireland I 
have heard voices of children at play a mile 
away come out of a fairy rath, or seem to come 
out of it, and here at far higher levels was a 
similar spell at work. Finally I located other 
voices, seeing people on the summit of Monroe 





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SUMMER'S FAREWELL 295 

and others down at the refuge hut near the Lake 
of the Clouds, talking to one another. That one 
party could hear the other at that distance was 
strange enough, but that I, a mile farther away 
than the people at the hut, could hear those on 
top of Monroe was a still greater proof of the 
wonderful clearness of the air at that time. 

Such a condition presages storm, and before 
night, from the summit of Washington, I watched 
it materialize from thin air. In the sunlit still- 
ness a thin, long line of cumulo-stratus clouds 
appeared circling the southern horizon from west 
to east. The line was broken in many places 
and it was lower than the summit, for I could 
see clear sky and land through the breaks. It 
did not seem possible that such a line of discon- 
nected clouds could bring storm. But they joined 
and thickened while I watched, and by and by, 
as if at a word of command, far to the south 
light scuds were detached from them and came 
scurrying in from beyond Chocorua, blotting out 
Tremont and Haystack, Bear and Moat, swal- 
lowing the Montalban Range and Rocky Branch 
ridge in their floating fluff, coasting up and over 



296 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

Boott's Spur and blotting out Tuckerman's Ra- 
vine. Tliey whirled in upon us, palpable, cotton- 
batting clouds with a chill in their touch, and 
wrapped all the summit in gray obscurity. 

Again and again they broke and let me see all 
about, and each time I saw that the ring of 
cumulo-stratus clouds was denser at the bottom, 
and had moved in towards us from all the south- 
ern half of the horizon. The sun set, but we 
did not see it. The world was blotted out in a 
gray mass of scudding vapor that gradually be- 
came black night, out of which by and by rain 
came hissing on a wind that shook the buildings 
of the tiny summit village beneath their clanking 
chains. Morning came, and noon of the next 
day. The wind ha3 changed from south to north- 
west, the sky in all valleys was clear, but still 
the dense clouds swirled about the cone of 
Washington and swathed the high ridge of the 
whole Presidential Range in masses of fleeting 
mist. No rain fell from this, but to stand in it 
was to gather and condense it in the pores of 
one's garments and become wringing wet. 




Si 



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SUMMER'S FAREWELL 297 

Feeling my way through this opaque bhndness 
down the painted trail to Tuckerman Ravine, I 
was well down to the verge of the head wall be- 
fore I could see below it. There the wind seems 
to make a funnel between the Lion's Head and 
Boott's Spur and draw the clouds through it so 
rapidly as to thin them. With the Fall of a 
Thousand Streams splashing all about me, I saw 
the gray masses lift and through them the sun 
pouring its autumn gold upon the plaid of Pink- 
ham Notch. The ravine below me was in 
shadow, but the fairy gold of that light seemed 
to flood back into it and infuse all its drip- 
ping firs and wet rocks with rainbow colors. It 
decked this mighty chasm in the mightiest moun- 
tain as if for a bridal, and all along the downward 
trail by the rushing Cutler River the firs shed 
diamonds and rubies with each touch of the wind, 
and the birches, yellow and black and white, held 
their autumn gold encrusted with precious stones. 

In such guise was the mountain decked for my 
farewell to it, and though the slanting sun shone 
warm on the Glen road when I reached it I was 
wet with the parting tears into which all this 



298 WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS 

finery dissolved as I passed. The summit is lone 
now. The last train has taken the villagers to 
the base and the village is boarded up. The 
hoar frost whitens it as I write and the film of 
ice dulls the clear eyes of the Lakes of the Clouds. 
Soon the snow will begin again to blow over the 
head wall into Tuckerman Ravine and mass at 
the bottom into the glacier which will once more 
stretch broad across the ravine next spring. 
Already the crimson of the rock maples which 
flames the woodland begins to sift down and 
leave the topmost twigs bare. Summer has said 
good-bye to the summit, and though she looks 
often fondly back she is well on her way south 
through the valleys. 



INDEX 



Aaron's rod, 7 

Adams, 116, 139, 167, 168, 178, 225 

John Quincy, 167, 169 

Sam, 167 

Admirals, white, 42, 49, 50, 51, 55, 

57, 58, 130, 134 
Aeolus, Father, 112, 127 
Albany intervales, 226 
Alder, 21, 40, 57, 99, 100, 157 

downy green, 157 

green, 157 

mountain, 157 

Alnus crispa, 157 

mollis, 157 

Alpine gardens, 98, 100, 119, 125, 

135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 

158, 187, 189, 269 

pastures, 154 

Amazon, 18 

Ambergris, 22 

A. M. C. camp, 91 

guide, 50 

signs, 97 

trail, 86 

Ammonoosuc Valley, 177 
Anderson, 225 
Anglewing, 134, 137 
Aphids, 198 
Apollo, 78 
Appalachian Mts., 14 

Club, 87 

gods, 125 

Apple trees, 19, 25 
Arctic butterfly, 135, 141 
ice, 114 



Arctic sea, 114 
Arden, Forest of, 238 
Arenaria groenlandica, 136, 186 
Argynnis atlantis, 131 

cybele, 131 

Arizona, 81, 118 
Arthur's Court, 117, 213 
Ash, mountain, 92 
Aspidium spinulosum, 189 
Aster, 197, 237, 252 

ericoides, 197 

novae'anglice, 236 

radula, 236 

white, i96,<237, 252 

Avalon, 204 

Avens, mountain, 100, 136, 163, 260 

Azalea, Alpine, 186 

Lapland, 135 



B 



Baldface, 119, 165, 290 
Barberry, 147 

Baron Munchausen's courier, 246 
Bartlett, Mt., 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 

53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 86, 225 

Lower, 48 

Base station, 116 
Bay, Casco, 57, 59, 113 
Bear, 52, 53, 54, 90, 246 
Bear Camp, 6 
Bear Mountain, 295 
Bee, bumble, 22, 41, 167 

wild, 85, 92 

Beech, 4, 5, 25, 67, 154, 234, 238, 

281 



300 



INDEX 



Beetles, 142 
Bellwort, 4, 40 
Bemis, 203, 204, 205, 225 
Berry bushes, 25 
Betula cordifolia, 155 

glandulosa, 155, 156, 253 

minor, 155 

papyrifera, 155, 156 

rotundifolia, 155, 156 

Bilberry, 182, 261 

Birch, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 37, 40, 41, 80, 

92, 93, 234, 238, 255, 256, 261, 

263, 273, 286, 289 

black, 297 

canoe, 289 

creeping, 155 

dwarf, 253, 260, 269 

paper, 156 

white, 25, 98, 105, 130, 155, 

274, 288, 297 
yellow, 25, 130, 154, 198, 206, 

252, 273, 278, 297 

Birds 

Blackpoll, 198 

Bobolinks, 17, 18, 19, 20, 26, 28, 

30, 31 
Bunting, indigo, 51, 150, 151 
Canary, 37 
"Candelita," 235 
Chickadees, 198, 199, 279 

black-capped, 198, 199, 200 

Hudsonian, 199, 200, 217, 218 

Finch, gold, 37, 150 

purple, 150 

Hawk, broad-winged, 10 

■ pigeon, 15 

red-tailed, 291 

Junco, 6, IS, 28, 37, 122, 141, 157, 

166, 190, 198 

hiemalis, 158 

Loon, 73 

Maryland yellow-throats, 28 
Nuthatch, red-breasted, 278, 279 
Phoebe, 24 



Picoides arcticus, 245 

Americanus, 245 

Redstart, 235 
Robin, 198, 282 
Sand-pipers, 73 

spotted, 73 

Sap-suckers, yellow-bellied, 5 
Sparrow, 150 

chipping, 198 

field, 8s 

song, 141, 198 

white- throated, 3, 122, 141, 

ISO, 198 
Swallow, 217 

bank, 141 

barn, 24 

eave, 74 

Swift, chimney, 24 
Thrush, 32, 37, 59, 240 

Bicknell's, 61 

hermit, 32, ^:^, 102, 105, 122 

water, 21, 28 

wood, 16, 21, 32, 33 

Veery, 32, 61 
Vireo, red-eyed, 198 

yellow- throated, 198 

Warblers, 37 

Blackburnian, 27, 37 

black-throated green, 28 

Canadian, 37 

Connecticut, 28 

Magnolia, 28, 37, 150, 188, 198 

mourning, 28, 37 

myrtle, 6, is, 37, 15°, 188, 198, 

23s 

Wilson's, 37 

wood, 102, 239 

yellow, 36 

yellow-rumped, 234 

Woodpecker, American three-toed, 

244 

Arctic three-toed, 244 

yellow-headed, 244, 248, 251 

Blackberry, 136, 163, 232 



INDEX 



301 



Black Mountain, 34, 86, 272, 273, 

290 
Blackpoll, 198 
Bloodstone, 293 
Blueberries, 232, 234, 263 

creeping, 293 

dwarf, 40, 41 

low, 289 

lowland, 182 

mountain, 7, 22 

Bobolinks, 17, 18, 19, 20, 26, 28, 

30, 31 

meadows, 20 

Boott's Spur, 97, 105, no, 114, 116, 

185, 282, 284, 286, 291, 292, 

293, 294, 296, 297 
Boulder, Glen, 286 
"Boulder, The," 287, 288 
Brakes, 289 
Bretton Woods, 66 
Brook, Saco, 206 

Gibbs', 192 

Brunella, 31, 133 

Buck, loi 

Bugle Cliff, 208, 210 

Bunchberry, 134 

Bunting, indigo, 51, 151 

Burbank, antediluvian, 266 

Buttercups, 19, 35, 36, 80 

Butterflies 
Admiral, white, 42, 49, 50, 51, 55, 

57, 58, 130, 134 
Angle wing, 134 
Arctic, 135, 141 
Argynnis, atlantis, 131 

cybele, 131 

yellow, 261 

Blue, little spring, 9 

Colias, philodice, 132, 261 

Corapton, tortoise, 9, 134, 138, 261 

Dusky-wings, 59 

Fritillary, great spangled, 131, 137 

mountain, 131, 134, 137, 138, 

217 



Fritillary, pangled, 82, 8^, 84, 130, 

134 
Grapta comma, 134 

interrogationis, 134, 137 

progne, 137, 261 

Hunters', 217 
Monarch, 138 
Mourning cloak, 9, 10, 58, 137, 217, 

261 
"Mt. Washington," 138 
Oeneis semidea, 135, 138, 139, 143, 

262 
Painted Lady, 58 
Papilio asterias, 41 

turnus, 39 

Skipper, 41, 58, 59 

orange, 132 

Sulphur, common, 261 
Swallowtail, eastern, 41 

tiger, 38, 41, 58 

Vanessa j-album, 134, 138 

milberti, 138 

"White Mt.," 13s, 138, 262 



Caddice-fly larvae, 103, 180 

Caerleon, 117 

"Camp 5," 223 

Canada, 23, 112 

Canary, 37 

"Candelita," 235 

Cannon, 256, 263, 264, 267 

Cape Horn Bend, 123 

Carbuncle, 82, 292 

Carrigain, Mt., 12, 65, 216, 222, 225, 
228, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 
235, 236, 237, 250, 292, 293, 
294, 295, 296 

Notch, 223, 224 

Cliffs, 90 

Carter, Dome, 65 

Carter-Moriah Range, 25, 280 

Mt., 89, 156, 273 



302 



INDEX 



Carter, Notch, 25, 83, 85, 87, 108, 
119, 282 

Cascade, crystal, 97, 98, 108 

Flume, 202 

Silver, 157, 202, 214 

Brook, 214 

Cattle, "white-faced," square- 
headed, 144, 150 

mountain, 145, 147 

Cedar, red, 147 

Celery, 137 

Chandler River, 170 

Ridge, 160, 205 

Checkerberry, 4, 265, 266 

Cherry bird, 9, 40, 234, 274 

Mts., 122 

wild, 25, 232, 263 

Chickadee, 198, 279 

black-capped, 198, 199, 200 

Hudsonian, 199, 200, 217, 218 

Chipmunk, 133, 140 

Chocorua Brook, 3 

Lake, i, 3, 5, 11, 16 

Mountain, i, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 

13, 14, IS, 226, 249, 291 

Summit, 11, 13, 14, 15 

town, 1 6 

Chrysoprase, 294 

Cinquefoil, three-toothed, 136, 163, 
260, 28s, 293 

Clay, 116, 164, 172, 225 

Clethra, 148 

Cliff Eagle, 257, 259, 263 

Clinton, 176, 192, 216 

Clintonia, 35, 134, 183, 213, 219 

borealis, 184 

Clover, 82 

red, 128 

white, 128, 133 

Colias, 217, 261 

— - — philodice, 132, 261 

Colonies, Massachusetts Bay, 82 

Company, Hudson Bay, 274 

Compton tortoise, 9, 134, 138, 261 

Conway Meadows, 49, 66 



Conway, North, 61, 63 

Cornel, 136 

dwarf, 54, 183 

Cornus canadensis, 184 

Corot, 5 

Cox, Palmer, 279 

Cranberry Mountain, 55, 217, 260, 
265 

tree, 22 

Crawford Glen, 205 

homestead, 207 

Mountain, 225 

Notch, 3, 46, 60, 114, 115, 191, 

19s, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 
201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 216, 
218, 223, 225, 231, 250, 256, 
264, 266 

Crescent Range, 168 

Crispa, 157 

Cushman, 262 

Cutler River, 97, 297 



D 



Daisy field, 132 

Dandelions, 19, 36, 37 

Dartmouth Range, 122 

Deer, 52, 158, 187, 241, 246, 248, 

281, 291 
Demoiselles, 73 
Derryveagh, 294 
Diamonds, 82, 297 
Diapensis lapponica, 186 
Dingmaul Rock, 165 
Doublehead, 34, 56, 275, 290 
Dryads, 67 
Dusky-wings, 59 



E 

Eagle, 204 

Cliff Notch, 257 

Mountain, 25, 34, 

Eastman, 165 



INDEX 



303 



Elaphrus olivaceus, 142 

Iffivigatus, 142 

Ellis River, 20, 22, 25, 29, 45, 48, 49, 

60, 73, 98, 157 
Elm, 66, 67, 68, 225 

meadow, 67, 68 

Emerald, 293 
Emerson, 23 
English borders, 145 
Eupatorium urticaefolium, 196 
Everlasting, 277 



Fabyan's, 116 

■ Plateau, 216, 294 

Falls, Glen Ellis, 108, 209 

Jackson, 21, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31, 

82 

"No-go," 62 

of a Thousand Streams, 297 

Ferns 

Aspidium spinulosum, 189 
Brake, 289 
Hay-scented, 289 
Osmunda claytonia, 189 
Polypody, 208, 209, 210, 211, 256 
Spinulose wood, 189, 208, 281 
Wood, 282 

Fernalds, 270 

Ferry, Cobb's, 200 

Field, 204 

Darby, 286 

Finch, gold, 37, 150 

purple, 150 

Fir, 4, 6, 25, 67, 70, 74, 132, 154, 155, 
186, 193, 200, 204, 208, 214, 
215, 218, 220, 222, 226, 228, 
234, 236, 237, 239, 254, 256, 
257, 258, 265, 277, 286, 290, 
291, 297 

dwarfed, 156, 182, 188, 207, 

215, 253, 269 



Firefly, 95, 123 
Florida, 18, 195 

swamp, 186 

Flume, 260 

Fly, blue bottle, 42 

dragon, 75 

white-bodied, 74 

Franconia, 267 

Mountain, 230 

Range, 235, 250, 257, 260, 

263 
Frankenstein Cliff, 205 

Trestle, 250 

Franklin, 176 

Fritillaries, moimtain, 131, 134, 137, 

138, 217 

great spangled, 131, 137 

spangled, 82, 83, 84, 130 

Frog, green, loi, 103 

tree, 103 

wood, 103 



Garfield, 235, 260 
Garnet, 294 
Gaultheria, 219 
Gemini, 34 
Gerrish, 28 

farm, 24, 28, 29, 276 

Geum, 185, 193 

Giant Stairs, 28, 225, 238, 239, 244, 

249, 250, 277 
Gibbs' Brook, 192 
Ginseng, 39 
Glen Ellis Valley, 72 
Glen Road, 28, 297 
Goldenrod, 252, 254 

Alpine, 185 

mountain, 162, 164, 167, 215, 

220, 236, 260 
Gooseberry, wild, 137 
Gorham, 97 
Grand Canon, 118 



304 



INDEX 



Granite, 13, 14, 15, 22, 23, 43, 52, 

57, 69, 146, 249, 292 

ledges, 21, 68 

Grapta comma, 134 

interrogationis, 134, 137 

progne, 137, 261 

Grass, blue-eyed, 133 

June, 163 

spear, 163, 167 

tape, 266 

Gulf, Great, 109, 112, 115, 116, 123, 

124, 138, 157, 160, 161, 163, 

167, 170, 172, 173, 177, 188, 

205, 265 
Oakes, 116, 149, 177, 187, 191, 

205, 216, 218, 225 

of slides, 108, 285, 291, 292 

Gulf Stream, 42 
Guyot, 216 



H 



Hackmatack Swamp, 246 
Ha2morrhagia diffinis, 41 
Halfway House, 134, 164 
Hall, 271, 273 

farm, 276 

Hancock, 223, 262 

Hardback, 149 

Harebell, blue, 197 

mountain, 161, 162, 163, 164, 

185 
Hawk, broad-winged, 10 

pigeon, 15 

red-tailed, 291 

Hayeses, 270 

farm, 276 

farmhouse, 34 

Haystack, 225, 230, 260, 295 

Hedgehog, 140, 195 

Hemlock, 4, 154, 206, 207, 214, 220, 

221 
Hills, New Hampshire, 17, 270 

Scottish, 145 

Welsh, 117 



Holland, 139 

Horse, 281 

Houstonia, 19, 100, 136, 182, 185, 

186 
Humming bird, 132 
Hunters' butterfly, 217 
Hypericum Ellipticum, 196 



Imp, 165 
India, 46 
Indian, 281, 286 

pipe, 214, 219 

poke, 136, 186, 187, 220, 221 

siunmer, 285 

Intervale, 61, 66 

Iron Mountain, 25, 32, 36, 38, 40, 

42, 44, 45, 238, 240, 249, 272, 

27s 
Israelites, 269 



Jackson, 18, 20, 21, 25, 34, 74, 86, 

97, 202, 206, 208, 215 

Meadows, 92 

Mountain, 28, 32, 202, 206, 

207, 208, 211, 215, 221 
Jacob's Ladder, no 
Jefferson, 118, 139, 165, 171, 172, 

178 

Brook, 122 

Johnsons, 271 

Juncos, 6, IS, 37, 122, 141, 157, 166, 

188, 198 

hiemalis, 158 

Jupiter, 113 
Pluvius, 127 



Kancamagus, 262 
Katahdin, 56 



INDEX 



305 



Kearsarge, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 
56, 57, 60, 86, 225, 249, 275, 
290 

S. E., 216 

Village, 61 

Kineo, 262 



Labrador tea, 92, 136, 149, 195, 217, 

261 
Lafayette, 65, 216, 230, 235, 252, 

254, 256, 259, 260, 261, 262, 

265, 266, 267 

Lakes 

Chocorua, i, 3, 5, 11, 16 

Conway, 291 

Eagle, 259, 264 

"Echo," 70 

Echo, 264 

Hermit, loi, 105, 106, 188, 265 

Lonely, 11 

Mirror, 70, 73 

Moran, 263 

Of Clouds, 124, 137, 139, 141, 142, 
149, 175, 180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 
186, 187, 189, 265, 284, 295, 298 

Ossipee, 11, 291 

Saco, 206 

Sebago, 57, 59 

Silver, 291 

Spaulding, 164, 188, 265 

Star, 264 

Storm, 167 

Laurel, sheep, 7 
Ledge, Hartt's, 200 
Liberty, 250, 260 
Lichen, gray, 257 

gray-green, 234, 247 

hepatic, 212, 213 

reindeer, 184, 213 

Lily, yellow pond, 266 
Lincoln, 230, 260 



Linnasa, 89 

Lion's Head, 106 

Livermore, 237 

London, 197 

Loon, 73 

Lowell Mountain, 224 



M 

Madison, 139, 160, 161, 168, 225, 

264 

hut, 168 

Mahomet's coffin, 279 

Mangroves, 287 

Maples, 4, 25, 67, 98, 154, 234, 241, 

252, 280, 288 

fruit, 5 

rock, SI, 130, 270, 274, 298 

swamp, 255 

Mars, 127 

Maryland yellow-throats, 28 
Meader, 165 
Meadow-sweet, 22, 149 
Memnon, pyramid of, 107 
Meriin, Old, 117 
Meserves, 271 
Mica, 81, 104, 292 

schist, 177, 184, 189 

Milkweed, 130 

Mitchella, 219 

Moat, 86, 242, 295 

Moats, The, 225 

Moccasin iiowers, 54, 57, 61 

Monarch butterfly, 138 

Monroe, 116, 124, 139, 175, 176, 

185, 190, 294, 29s 
Montalban Range, 28, 42, 106, 225, 

277, 29s 

Ridge, 225 

Moose, 280 

Moosewood, mountain, 53, 61, 92, 

129, 148 

striped, 28, 129, 148 

Moosilauke, 262 



3o6 



INDEX 



Moriah, io6, 165 

Moss, cladonia, gray-green, 184 

dainty cedar, 212, 216, 241, 

247, 256, 257, 259 

hairy cap, 184, 212 

Moth, clear wing, 41, 132 

Haemorrhagia diffinis, 41 

small white, 132 

snowberry, 41 

Mountains 

Adams, 116, 139, 167, 168, 178, 225 

John Quincy, 167, 169 

Sam, 167 

Anderson, 225 

Avalon, 204 

Baldface, 119, 165, 290 

Bartlett, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 

54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 86, 225 

Lower, 48 

Bear, 295 

Camp, 6 

Bemis, 203, 204, 205, 225 
Black, 34, 86, 272, 273, 290 
Boott's Spur, 97, 105, no, 114, 116, 

185, 282, 284, 286, 291, 292, 

293, 294, 296, 297 
Cannon, 256, 263, 264, 267 
Carrigain, 12, 65, 216, 222, 225, 228, 

230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 

236, 237, 250, 292, 293, 294, 

29s, 296 
Carter, 89, 165, 273 

Cliffs, 90 

Dome, 65 

Cherry, 122 

Chocorua, i, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 

15, 226, 249, 291 
Clay, 116, 164, 172, 225 
Clinton, 176, 192, 216 
Crawford, 225 
Cushman, 262 
Derryveagh, 294 
Doublehead, 34, 56, 275, 290 
Eagle, 25, 34, 86 



Eastman, 165 

Field, 204 

Flume, 260 

Franconia, 230 

Frankenstein Cliff, 205 

Franklin, 176 

Garfield, 235, 260 

Gemini, 34 

Giant Stairs, 28, 225, 238, 239, 244, 

249, 250, 277 
Guyot, 216 
Hancock, 223, 262 
Haystack, 225, 230, 260, 295 
Iron, 25, 32, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45, 

238, 240, 249, 272, 275 
Jackson, 28, 32, 202, 206, 207, 208, 

211, 215, 221 
Jefferson, 1 18, 139, 1 65, 1 71 , 1 72, 1 78 
Kancamagus, 262 
Katahdin, 56 
Kearsarge, 45, 46, 48, 50, 51, 55, 

56, 57, 60, 86, 225, 249, 27s, 

290 

S. E., 216 

Kineo, 262 

Lafayette, 65, 216, 230, 235, 252, 

254, 256, 259, 260, 261, 262, 

265, 266, 267 
Liberty, 230, 260 
Lincoln, 230, 260 
Lion's Head, 106, 119, 297 
Lowell, 224 
Madison, 139, 160, 161, 168, 225, 

264 
Meader, 165 
Moat, 86, 242, 295 
Moats, The, 225 
Monroe, 116, 124, 139, 175, 176, 

185, 190, 294, 29s 
Moosilauke, 262 
Moriah, 106, 165 
Nancy, 205, 225 
Nelson Crag, 116, 119, 160, 170 
Northern Peaks, 161, 174, 191, 205, 

26s 



INDEX 



307 



Olympus, 56, 6s 

Osceola, 262 

Ossipees, i, 6, 86, 262, 272, 291 

Owl's Head, 229 

Parker, 28 

Passaconaway, 11, 226 

Paugus, II, 15, 226, 291 

Pleasant, 61, 176, 218 

Range 

Carter-Moriah, 35, 280 

Crescent, 168 

Dartmouth, 122 

Franconia, 235, 250, 257, 260, 

263 

Montalban, 28, 42, 106, 225, 

277, 29s 

Ossipee, 86 

Presidential, 12, 25, 42, 43, 46, 

60, 72, 128, 139, 153, 156, 160, 
162, 163, 173, 176, 186, 198, 
205, 216, 218, 230, 260, 262, 
284, 286, 287 

Rosebrook, 204 

Sandwich, 6, 86, 216, 226, 250 

Squam, 262 

Resolution, 28, 249, 251 

Ridge, Chandler, 160, 205 

Montalban, 225 

Rocky Branch, 25, 28, 108, 

29s 
Signal, 223, 224, 226, 228, 229, 

236, 237 
Rocky, i8r 
Sandwich Dome, 226 

Peaks, 230 

Shaw, 34 

Sloop, 34 

Spruce, 25 

Stairs, 244, 245, 251 

Table, 225 

Tecumseh, 262 

Thorn, 17, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 

34, 86, 272, 290 
Tin, 24, 34, 86 
Tom, 204 



Tremont, 225, 295 

Tripyramid, 12 

Twins, The, 216 

Vose Spur, 223 

Washington, 12, 25, 29, 43, 56, 65, 
79, 84, 97, 98, 112, 117, 128, 
129, 133, 137, 139, 142, 149, 
150, 156, 157, 160, 161, 164, 

171, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 
191, 216, 225,. 230, 243, 265, 
268, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296 

Webster, 11, 28, 202, 205, 211, 225 

White, 253, 270 

White Face, 12, 226 

Whittier, 6 

Wildcat, 25, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, 
94, 95, 119, 165, 268, 270, 271, 
272, 273, 277, 280, 290 

Willard, 191, 192, 194, 203, 204, 
20s 

Willey, 205, 223 

Mourning-cloak, 9, 10, 58, 137, 

217, 261 
Mouse, 246 

N 

Nancy, 205, 225 

Nelson Crag, 116, 119, 160, 170 

Northern Peaks, 161, 174, 191, 205, 

206 
Notch, Carrigain, 223, 224 
Carter, 25, 83, 85, 87, 108, 

119, 282 
Crawford, 3, 46, 60, 114, 115, 

191, 19s, 196, 197, 198, 199, 

200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 

216, 218, 223, 225, 231, 250, 

256, 264, 266 

Eagle Cliff, 257 

Pinkham, 25, 49, 98, 106, 115, 

157, 270, 285, 286, 288 

Profile, 267 

Zealand, 216, 229 



3o8 



INDEX 



Nuthatch, 280, 281 

red-breasted, 278, 279 



O 



Oeneis semidea, 135, 138, 143, 262 
Old Man of the Mountain, 266 
Olympus, 56, 65 
Orlando, 238 
Osceola, 262 
Osmunda claytonia, 189 
Ossipee, Lake, 11, 291 

Mountains, i, 6, 86, 262, 272, 

291 

Range, 86 

Valley, 42 

Owl's Head, 229 



Pandora's Box, 121 
Papilio asterias, 41 

tumus, 39 

Parker Mountain, 28 
Partridge, 132 

berry, 4 

Passaconaway, 11, 226 
Paugus, II, IS, 226 
Peabody River, 134, 161, 170 
Peak, Northern, 161, 174, 191. 205, 

26s 

Slide, 270, 290, 293 

Southern, 293 

Pemigewasset River, 223 

Valley, 229, 230, 231, 232, 254, 

262, 264 
Pequawkets, 280 
Peter Pan, 240, 241 
Phoebe, 24 

Phylodoce coerulea, 136 
Picoides Americanus, 245 

Arcticus, 24s 

Pine, 4, 205, 231, 232 



Pinkham Notch, 25, 49, 98, 106, 
IIS, 157, 270, 28s, 286, 288 

Pipsissewa, 4 

Pleasant Mountain, 61, 176, 218 

Plymouth, 264 

Polypody, 208, 209, 210, 211, 256 

Pond, Lovell's, S9 

"Pool, The Dismal," 194 

Poplar, 7, 40, 41, 81 

Porcupine, S3, 87, 88, 90, 94, 105, 
241 

Portland, 113 

Potentilla tridentata, 136 

Presidential Range, 12, 2s, 42, 43, 
46, 60, 72, 128, 139, IS3, 156, 
160, 162, 163, 173, 176, 186, 
198, 20s, 216, 218, 230, 260, 
262, 284, 286, 287 

Profile Notch, 267 

Puget Sound, 77 



Quartz, 292 

quarries, 249 

vein, 98 

R 

Rabbit, cotton-tail, 132 
Raccoon, 196 
Ragwort, golden, 132 
Randolph, 168 
Raphael, 18 
Rattlesnake root, 162 

Ravines 

Huntington, iis, 119, 124, i37, i77, 
187, 269 

Jefferson, i6s 

Tuckerman's, 96, 97, 99, los, 108, 
109, no, III, 114, IIS, 13s, 
137, 149, 157, 177, 180, 188, 
189, 26s, 269, 285, 296, 297, 



INDEX 



309 



Redstart, 235 

Resolution Mountain, 28, 249, 251 

Rhododendron "slicks," 287 

Rhodora, 22, 57 

River, Chandler, 170 

Cutler, 97, 297 

Ellis, 20, 22, 25, 29, 45, 48, 

49, 60, 73, 98, 157 

Peabody, 134, 161, 170 

Pemigewasset, 223 

Saco, 22, 45, 48, 49, 60, 191, 

194, 19s, 197, 205, 206, 243, 

272 
Sawyer's, 200, 203, 205, 223, 

236, 237 

Swift, 226 

Wild, 119 

Wildcat, 20, 82, 83, 8s, 86, 

91, 94, 270, 271 
Robertson's, Mark, rustic bridge, 2 
Robin, 198 
Roc, 46 
Rocky Branch Valley, 240, 242, 

243, 292 

Mountains, 181 

Ridge, 25, 28, 108, 295 

Rosalind, 238, 239, 241 
Rose-bay, Lapland, 186 
Rosebrook Range, 204 
Round Table, 117 
Rubens, 18 
Ruby, 297 



Saco River, 22, 45, 48, 49, 60, 191, 
194, 19s, 197, 20s, 206, 243, 272 

Valley, 61 

Samite, 44 
Sand-pipers, 73 

• spotted, 73, 195 

Sandstone, brown, 287 
Sandwich Dome, 226 

Peaks, 230 

Range, 6, 86, 216, 226, 250 



Sandwort, mountain, 136, 163, 164, 
183, 185, 187, 217, 260 

Sap-suckers, yellow-bellied, 5 

Sawyer's River, 200, 203, 205, 223, 
236, 237 

Scudder farmhouse, 2 

Sea, Caribbean, 18 

Semidea, 139 

Shamrock, 133 

Shaw, 34 

Signal Ridge, 223, 224, 226, 228, 
229, 236, 237 

Sinbad, 46 

Skipper butterfly, 58 

orange, 132 

Sloop, 34 

Smilacina, 4 

Snake, garter, 85, 87 

"Snake-root, white," 196 

Snow arch, 96, 97, 99, loi, 103, 
106, 109 

Snowberry, creeping, 217, 265, 266 

Society, Cambridge Entomological, 
142, 218 

Solidago cutleri, 185 

Solomon's seal, 4, 40 

Sorrel, wood, 133, 213 

Sparrow, chipping, 198 

field, 8s 

song, 141, 198 

white- throated, 3, 122, iso 

Spiraea latifolia, 149, 162 

tomentosa, 149 

Spring, Peabody, 167 

Poland, 66 

Spruce, 4, 6, 7, is, 25, 26, 30, 31, 
37. 40, 41, 67, 72, los, 132, 134, 
141, 147, 154, iSS, 186, 188, 
192, 193, 196, 198, 200, 205, 
222, 226, 228, 229, 231, 232, 
234, 23s, 239, 243, 246, 2S4, 
2s8, 265, 269, 277, 290, 291, 
292 

black, 26, 71, 195, 23s 

dwarf, 8, 9, 93, 156, 167, 207 



3IO 



INDEX 



Spruce, mountain, 25 

tops, so 

Squam Range, 262 
Squirrel, gray, 140 
Stairs, Brook Valley, 243 
Stairs, Mountain, 244, 245, 251 
Star-flower, American, 136 
Steeple bush, 149 
St.-John's-wort, 196 
St. Patrick, 133 
Strawberries, wild, 81, 92 
Striders, water, 179, 180 
Sumac, 40 
Swallow, 217 

bank, 141 

barn, 24 

eave, 74 

Swallowtails, eastern, 41 

tiger, 38, 41, 58 

Swift, 226 



Table Mountain, 225 

Tecumseh, 262 

"Tenth Turnpike," 191 

Thor, 13 

Thoreau, 218 

Thorn Mountain, 17, 24, 26, 27, 

29, 30, 32, 34, 86, 272, 290 
Thorough worts, 196 
Thrush, 32, 37, 59, 240 

Bicknell's, 61 

hermit, 32, 53, 102, 105, 122 

water, 21, 28 

wood, 16, 21, 32, 33 

Tin Mountain, 24, 34, 86 
Toad, great gray, 89, 91, 94 
Tom, 204 
Topaz, 294 
Tourmaline, black, 292 

Trails 

A. M. C. to Carter Notch, 86 
Carriage road, 124, 129, 161 



Crawford, 124, 138, 139 

bridle path, 176 

Davis, 251 
Glen Boulder, 293 
Gulf Side, 124, 169, 171 
Hammond, 3, 16 
Tuckerman's, 124 

Tremont Mountain, 225, 295 
Trientalis, 136 
Trillium, 219 

painted, 4 

purple, 4 

Tripyramid, 12 
Turtle, box, 57 
Turtle-head, 237 
Twins, The, 216 



U 



Ursula Major, 88 



Valley, Ammcnoosuc, 177 

Glen Ellis, 72 

Ossipee, 42 

Pemigewasset, 229, 230, 231, 

232, 254, 262, 264 
Rocky Branch, 240, 242, 243, 

292 

Saco, 61 

Stairs' Brook, 293 

Wildcat, 25, 272, 278, 282 

Vanessa j-album, 134, 138 

milberti, 138 

Veery, 32, 61 
Venus, 27 

Veratrum viride, 186 
Viburnums, 21 
Viola cucullata, 23 

palustris, 183 

Violets, blue, 23, 31, 35 



INDEX 



311 



Violets, lilac alpine, 100, 183 

meadow, 19 

Vireo, 198 

red-eyed, 198 

yellow-throated, 198 

Vose Spur, 223 
Vulcan, 78 

W 

Warbler, 37 

Blackburnian, 27, 37 

black-throated, green, 28 

Canadian, 37 

Connecticut, 28 

Magnolia, 28, 37, 150, 188, 198 

mourning, 28, 37 

myrtle, 6, 15, 37, 150, 188, 

198, 235 

Wilson's, 37 

wood, 102, 239 

yellow, 36 

yellow-rumped, 234 

Washington, Booker, 287 

carriage road, 124, 129, 161 

George, 287 

Mount, 12, 25, 29, 43, 56, 65, 

79, 84, 97, 98, 112, 117, 128, 
129, 133, 137, 139, 142, 149, 
150, 156, 157, 160, 161, 164, 

171, 17s, 176, 177, 178, 179, 
191, 216, 225, 230, 243, 265, 
268, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296 

railroad, 116, 142 

Webster, Mt., 11, 28, 202, 205, 211, 
225 

Wendy, 240 

Wentworths, 271 



White Face, 12, 226 

White Mountain butterfly, 138, 261 

White Mountains, 253, 270 

Whittier, Mt., 6 

Wild River, 119 

Wildcat Mountain, 25, 86, 87, 88, 

89, 91, 93, 94, 95, "9, 165, 268, 

270, 271, 272, 273, 277, 280, 290 

meadows, 84 

River, 20, 82, 83, 85, 86, 91, 

94, 270, 271 

Valley, 25, 272, 278, 282 

Willard, 191, 192, 194, 203, 204, 

205 
Willey House, 197, 203 
Willey Mountain, 205, 223 
Willow, 7, 155 

creeping, 156 

Wilsons, 271 

Withe-rod, 289 

Woodchuck, 153 

Woodpecker, American three-toed, 

244 

Arctic three-toed, 244 

yellow-headed, 244, 248, 251 

Woodstock, 264 



Yarrow, pink, 134 
white, 134 



Zealand Notch, 216, 229 
Zeus, 78 



JUN 6 1912 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



013 983 871 3 



